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GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 


MR.  WELLS  HAS  ALSO  WRITTEN 

The  Folloicing  Novels: 

Love  a>d  ]\Ijb.  Lewisham 

Kipps 

Mb.  Polly 

The  Wheels  of  Chajsxe 

The  New  Machiavelli 

Ann  Veeonica 

ToNo  Bungay 

Marriage 

Bealby 

The  Passionate  Fbiei^'ds 

The  Wife  of  Sib  Isaac  Habman 

The  Research  Magnificent 

Mb.  Bbitling  Sees  It  Thbough 

The  Following  Fantastic  and  Imaginative  Romances: 
The  Wab  of  the  W^oelds 
The  Time  Machine 
The  Wonderful  Visit 
The  Island  of  De.  Moeeau 
The  Sea  Lady 
The  Sleepee  Awakes 
The  Food  of  the  Gods 
The  Wab  in  the  Aie 
The  First  Men  in  the  Moon 
In  the  Days  of  the  Comet 
The  World  Set  Free 

And  Numerous  Short  Stories  Noio  Collected  in  One  Volume  Under 
the  Title  of: 
The  Country  of  the  Blind 

A  Series  of  Books  upon  Social  and  Political  Questions: 

Anticipations   (1900) 

Mankind  in  the  Making 

First  and  Last  Things  (Religion  and  Philosophy) 

New  Worlds  fob  Old 

A  Modern  Utopia 

The  Future  in  America 

An  Englishman  Looks  at  the  Wobld 

What  Is  Coming? 

Wab  and  the  Fututje 

And  Two  Little  Books  About  Qhildren's  Play  Called 

Floob  Games 
Little  Wabs 


GOD 

THE  INVISIBLE  KING 


BY 
H.   G.  WELLS 


Npw  fork 
THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 
1917 

All  rights  reserved 


COPYEIGHT,    1917, 

BY  H.   G.  WELLS 


Set  up  and  electrotyped.     Published,  May,   1917. 


PREFACE 

This  book  sets  out  as  forcibly  and  exactly  as  pos- 
sible the  religious  belief  of  the  writer.  That  belief 
is  not  orthodox  Christianity;  it  is  not,  indeed, 
Christianity  at  all;  its  core  nevertheless  is  a  pro- 
found belief  in  a  personal  and  intimate  God.  There 
is  nothing  in  its  statements  that  need  shock  or  of- 
fend anyone  who  is  prepared  for  the  expression  of 
a  faith  different  from  and  perhaps  in  several  par- 
ticulars opposed  to  his  own.  The  writer  will  be 
found  to  be  sympathetic  with  all  sincere  religious 
feeling.  Nevertheless  it  is  well  to  prepare  the 
prospective  reader  for  statements  that  may  jar 
harshly  against  deeply  rooted  mental  habits.  It  is 
well  to  warn  him  at  the  outset  that  the  departure 
from  accepted  beliefs  is  here  no  vague  scepticism, 
but  a  quite  sharply  defined  objection  to  dogmas 
very  widely  revered.  Let  the  writer  state  the  most 
probable  occasion  of  trouble  forthwith.  An  issue 
upon  which  this  book  will  be  found  particularly  un- 
compromising is  the  dogma  of  the  Trinity.     The 

ix 


X  PREFACE 

writer  is  of  opinion  that  the  Council  of  Nicsea, 
which  forcibly  crystallised  the  controversies  of  two 
centuries  and  formulated  the  creed  upon  which  all 
the  existing  Christian  churches  are  based,  Avas  one 
of  the  most  disastrous  and  one  of  the  least  venerable 
of  all  religious  gatherings,  and  he  holds  that  the 
Alexandrine  speculations  which  were  then  conclu- 
sively imposed  upon  Christianity  merit  only  dis- 
respectful attention  at  the  present  time.  There 
you  have  a  chief  possibility  of  offence.  He  is  quite 
unable  to  pretend  any  awe  for  what  he  considers 
the  spiritual  monstrosities  established  by  that  un- 
dignified gathering.  He  makes  no  attempt  to  be 
obscure  or  propitiatory  in  this  connection.  He 
criticises  the  creeds  explicitly  and  frankly,  because 
he  believes  it  is  particularly  necessary  to  clear 
them  out  of  the  way  of  those  who  are  seeking  re- 
ligious consolation  at  this  present  time  of  excep- 
tional religious  need.  He  does  little  to  conceal  his 
indignation  at  the  role  played  by  these  dogmas 
in  obscuring,  perverting,  and  preventing  the  re- 
ligious life  of  mankind.  After  this  warning  such 
readers  from  among  the  various  Christian  churches 
and  sects  as  are  accessible  to  storms  of  theological 
fear  or  passion  to  whom  the  Trinity  is  an  ineffable 
mystery  and  the  name  of  God  almost  unspeakably 


PREFACE  xi 

awful,  read  on  at  their  own  risk.  This  is  a  re- 
ligious book  written  by  a  believer,  but  so  far  as 
their  beliefs  and  religion  go  it  may  seem  to  them 
more  sceptical  and  more  antagonistic  than  blank 
atheism.  That  the  writer  cannot  tell.  He  is  not 
simply  denying  their  God.  He  is  declaring  that 
there  is  a  living  God,  different  altogether  from  that 
Triune  God  and  nearer  to  the  heart  of  man.  The 
spirit  of  this  book  is  like  that  of  a  missionary  who 
would  only  too  gladly  overthrow  and  smash  some 
Polynesian  divinity  of  shark's  teeth  and  painted 
wood  and  mother-of-pearl.  To  the  w^riter  such 
elaborations  as  "  begotten  of  the  Father  before  all 
worlds"  are  no  better  than  intellectual  shark's 
teeth  and  oyster  shells.  His  purpose,  like  the  pur- 
pose of  that  missionary,  is  not  primarily  to  shock 
and  insult;  but  he  is  zealous  to  liberate,  and  he  is 
impatient  with  a  reverence  that  stands  between 
man  and  God.  He  gives  this  fair  warning  and 
proceeds  with  his  matter. 

His  matter  is  modern  religion  as  he  sees  it.  It 
is  only  incidentally  and  because  it  is  unavoidable 
that  he  attacks  doctrinal  Christianity. 

In  a  previous  book,  "First  and  Last  Things" 
(Constable  and  Co.),  he  has  stated  his  convictions 
upon  certain  general  ideas  of  life  and  thought  as 


xii  PREFACE 

clearly  as  he  could.  All  of  philosophy,  all  of  meta- 
physics that  is,  seems  to  him  to  be  a  discussion  of 
the  relations  of  class  and  individual.  The  an- 
tagonism of  the  Nominalist  and  the  Realist,  the 
opposition  of  the  One  and  the  Many,  the  contrast 
of  the  Ideal  and  the  Actual,  all  these  oppositions 
express  a  certain  structural  and  essential  duality 
in  the  activity  of  the  human  mind.  From  an  im- 
perfect recognition  of  that  duality  ensue  great 
masses  of  misconception.  That  was  the  substance 
of  "  First  and  Last  Things."  In  this  present  book 
there  is  no  further  attack  on  philosophical  or  meta- 
physical questions.  Here  we  work  at  a  less  funda- 
mental level  and  deal  with  religious  feeling  and 
religious  ideas.  But  just  as  the  writer  was  in- 
clined to  attribute  a  whole  world  of  disputation 
and  inexactitudes  to  confused  thinking  about  the 
exact  value  of  classes  and  terms,  so  here  he  is  dis- 
posed to  think  that  interminable  controversies  and 
conflicts  arise  out  of  a  confusion  of  intention  due 
to  a  double  meaning  of  the  word  "  God  " ;  that  the 
word  "  God  "  conveys  not  one  idea  or  set  of  ideas, 
but  several  essentially  different  ideas,  incompatible 
one  with  another,  and  falling  mainly  into  one  or 
other  of  two  divergent  groups;  and  that  people 
slip  carelessly  from  one  to  the  other  of  these  groups 


PREFACE  xiii 

of  ideas  and  so  get  into  ultimately  inextricable  con- 
fusions. 

The  writer  believes  that  the  centuries  of  fluid 
religious  thought  that  preceded  the  violent  ulti- 
mate crystallisation  of  Mcsea,  was  essentially  a 
struggle  —  obscured,  of  course,  by  many  complexi- 
ties —  to  reconcile  and  get  into  a  relationship  these 
two  separate  main  series  of  God-ideas. 

Putting  the  leading  idea  of  this  book  very 
roughly,  these  two  antagonistic  typical  conceptions 
of  God  may  be  best  contrasted  by  speaking  of  one 
of  them  as  God-as-Nature  or  the  Creator,  and  of 
the  other  as  God-as-Christ  or  the  Redeemer.  One 
is  the  great  Outward  God ;  the  other  is  the  Inmost 
God.  The  first  idea  was  perhaps  developed  most 
highly  and  completely  in  the  God  of  Spinoza.  It 
is  a  conception  of  God  tending  to  pantheism,  to  an 
idea  of  a  comprehensive  God  as  ruling  with  justice 
rather  than  affection,  to  a  conception  of  aloofness 
and  awestriking  worshipfulness.  The  second  idea, 
which  is  opposed  to  this  idea  of  an  absolute  God, 
is  the  God  of  the  human  heart.  The  writer  would 
suggest  that  the  great  outline  of  the  theological 
struggles  of  that  phase  of  civilisation  and  world 
unity  which  produced  Christianity,  was  a  persistent 
but  unsuccessful  attempt  to  get  these  two  different 


xiv  TREFACE 

ideas  of  God  into  one  focus.  It  was  an  attempt  to 
make  the  God  of  Nature  accessible  and  the  God 
of  the  Heart  invincible,  to  bring  the  former  into 
a  conception  of  love  and  to  vest  the  latter  with  the 
beauty  of  stars  and  flowers  and  the  dignity  of  in- 
exorable justice.  There  could  be  no  finer  metaphor 
for  such  a  correlation  than  Fatherhood  and  Son- 
ship.  But  the  trouble  is  that  it  seems  impossible 
to  most  people  to  continue  to  regard  the  relations 
of  the  Father  to  the  Son  as  being  simply  a  mysti- 
cal metaphor.  Presently  some  materialistic  bias 
swings  them  in  a  moment  of  intellectual  careless- 
ness back  to  the  idea  of  sexual  filiation. 

And  it  may  further  be  suggested  that  the  extreme 
aloofness  and  inhumanity,  which  is  logically  nec- 
essary in  the  idea  of  a  Creator  God,  of  an  Infinite 
God,  was  the  reason,  so  to  speak,  for  the  invention 
of  a  Holy  Spirit,  as  something  proceeding  from  him, 
as  something  l)ridging  the  great  gulf,  a  Comforter, 
a  mediator  descending  into  the  sphere  of  the  hu- 
man understanding.  That,  and  the  suggestive  in- 
fluence of  the  Egyptian  Trinity  that  was  then 
being  worshipped  at  the  Serapeum,  and  which  had 
saturated  the  thought  of  Alexandria  with  the  con- 
ception of  a  trinity  in  unity,  are  probably  the  re- 
alities that  account  for  the  Third  Person  of  the 


PREFACE  XV 

Christian  Trinity.  At  any  rate  the  present  writer 
believes  that  the  discussions  that  shaped  the  Chris- 
tian theology  we  know  were  dominated  by  such 
natural  and  fundamental  thoughts.  These  discus- 
sions were,  of  course,  complicated  from  the  outset ; 
and  particularly  were  they  complicated  by  the 
identification  of  the  man  Jesus  with  the  theological 
Christ,  by  materialistic  expectations  of  his  second 
coming,  by  materialistic  inventions  about  his 
"  miraculous  "  begetting,  and  by  the  morbid  specu- 
lations about  virginity  and  the  like  that  arose  out 
of  such  grossness.  They  w^ere  still  further  com- 
plicated by  the  idea  of  the  textual  inspiration  of  the 
scriptures,  which  presently  swamped  thought  in 
textual  interpretation.  That  swamping  came  very 
early  in  the  development  of  Christianity.  The 
writer  of  St.  John's  gospel  appears  still  to  be  think- 
ing with  a  considerable  freedom,  but  Origen  is  al- 
ready hopelessly  in  the  net  of  the  texts.  The  writer 
of  St.  John's  gospel  was  a  free  man,  but  Origen 
was  a  superstitious  man.  He  was  emasculated 
mentally  as  well  as  bodily  through  his  bibliolatry. 
He  quotes;  his  predecessor  thinks. 

But  the  writer  throws  out  these  guesses  at  the 
probable  intentions  of  early  Christian  thought  in 
passing.     His  business  here  is  the  definition  of  a 


xvi  PREFACE 

position.  The  writer's  position  here  in  this  book 
is,  firstly,  complete  Agnosticism  in  the  matter  of 
God  the  Creator,  and  secondly,  entire  faith  in  the 
matter  of  God  the  Redeemer.  That,  so  to  speak,  is 
the  key  of  his  book.  He  cannot  bring  the  two 
ideas  under  the  same  term  God.  He  uses  the  word 
God  therefore  for  the  God  in  our  hearts  only,  and 
he  uses  the  term  the  Veiled  Being  for  the  ultimate 
mysteries  of  the  universe,  and  he  declares  that  we 
do  not  know  and  perhaps  cannot  know  in  any  com- 
prehensible terms  the  relation  of  the  Veiled  Being 
to  that  living  reality  in  our  lives  who  is,  in  his 
terminology,  the  true  God.  Speaking  from  the 
point  of  view  of  practical  religion,  he  is  restricting 
and  defining  the  word  God,  as  meaning  only  the 
personal  God  of  mankind,  he  is  restricting  it  so  as 
to  exclude  all  cosmogony  and  ideas  of  providence 
from  our  religious  thought  and  leave  nothing  but 
the  essentials  of  the  religious  life. 

Many  people,  whom  one  would  class  as  rather 
liberal  Christians  of  an  Arian  or  Arminian  com- 
plexion, may  find  the  larger  part  of  this  book  ac- 
ceptable to  them  if  they  will  read  "  the  Christ  God  " 
where  the  writer  has  written  "  God."  They  will 
then  differ  from  him  upon  little  more  than  the 
question  whether  there  is  an  essential  identity  in 


PREFACE  xvii 

aim  and  quality  between  the  Christ  God  and  the 
Veiled  Being,  who  answer  to  their  Creator  God. 
This  the  orthodox  post  Nicaean  Christians  assert, 
and  many  pre-Nicaeans  and  many  heretics  (as  the 
Cathars)  contradicted  with  its  exact  contrary. 
The  Cathars,  Paulicians,  Albigenses  and  so  on  held, 
with  the  Manichgeans,  that  the  God  of  Nature,  God 
the  Father,  was  evil.  The  Christ  God  was  his  an- 
tagonist. This  was  the  idea  of  the  poet  Shelley. 
And  passing  beyond  Christian  theology  altogether 
a  clue  can  still  be  found  to  many  problems  in 
comparative  theology  in  this  distinction  between 
the  Being  of  Nature  (c/.  Kant's  "starry  vault 
above  ")  and  the  God  of  the  heart  (Kant's  "  moral 
law  within").  The  idea  of  an  antagonism  seems 
to  have  been  cardinal  in  the  thought  of  the  Essenes 
and  the  Orphic  cult  and  in  the  Persian  dualism. 
So,  too.  Buddhism  seems  to  be  "  antagonistic."  On 
the  other  hand,  the  Moslem  teaching  and  modern 
Judaism  seem  absolutely  to  combine  and  identify 
the  two ;  God  the  creator  is  altogether  and  without 
distinction  also  God  the  King  of  Mankind.  Chris- 
tianity stands  somewhere  between  such  complete 
identification  and  complete  antagonism.  It  admits 
a  difference  in  attitude  between  Father  and  Son 
in  its  distinction  between  the  Old  Dispensation  (of 


xviii  PREFACE 

tlie  Old  Testament)  and  the  New.  Every  possible 
change  is  rung  in  the  great  religions  of  the  world 
between  identification,  complete  separation,  equal- 
ity, and  disproportion  of  these  Beings ;  but  it  will  be 
found  that  these  two  ideas  are,  so  to  speak,  the  basal 
elements  of  all  theology  in  the  world.  The  writer 
is  chary  of  assertion  or  denial  in  these  matters. 
He  believes  that  they  are  speculations  not  at  all 
necessary  to  salvation.  He  believes  that  men  may 
differ  profoundly  in  their  opinions  upon  these 
points  and  still  be  in  perfect  agreement  upon  the 
essentials  of  religion.  The  reality  of  religion  he 
believes  deals  wholly  and  exclusively  with  the  God 
of  the  Heart.  He  declares  as  his  own  opinion,  and 
as  the  opinion  which  seems  most  expressive  of  mod- 
ern thought,  that  there  is  no  reason  to  suppose 
the  Veiled  Being  either  benevolent  or  malignant 
towards  men.  But  if  the  reader  believes  that  God 
is  Almighty  and  in  every  way  Infinite  the  practical 
outcome  is  not  very  different.  For  the  purposes  of 
human  relationship  it  is  impossible  to  deny  that 
God  presents  himself  as  finite,  as  struggling  and 
taking  a  part  against  evil. 

The  writer  believes  that  these  dogmas  of  relation- 
ship are  not  merely  extraneous  to  religion,  but  an 
impediment  to  religion.     His  aim  in  this  book  is 


PREFACE  xix 

to  give  a  statement  of  religion  wMck  is  no  longer 
entangled  in  such  speculations  and  disputes. 

Let  him  add  only  one  other  note  of  explanation 
in  this  preface,  and  that  is  to  remark  that  except 
for  one  incidental  passage  (in  Chapter  IV.,  §  1), 
nowhere  does  he  discuss  the  question  of  personal 
immortality.^  He  omits  this  question  because  he 
does  not  consider  that  it  has  any  more  bearing 
upon  the  essentials  of  religion,  than  have  the  the- 
ories we  may  hold  about  the  relation  of  God  and 
the  moral  law  to  the  starry  universe.  The  latter 
is  a  question  for  the  theologian,  the  former  for  the 
psychologist.  Whether  we  are  mortal  or  immortal, 
whether  the  God  in  our  hearts  is  the  Son  of  or  a 
rebel  against  the  Universe,  the  reality  of  religion, 
the  fact  of  salvation,  is  still  our  self-identification 
with  God,  irrespective  of  consequences,  and  the 
achievement  of  his  kingdom,  in  our  hearts  and  in 
the  world.  Whether  we  live  forever  or  die  to- 
morrow does  not  affect  righteousness.  Many  peo- 
ple seem  to  find  the  prospect  of  a  final  personal 
death  unendurable.  This  impresses  me  as  egotism. 
I  have  no  such  appetite  for  a  separate  immortality. 
God  is  my  immortality;  what,  of  me,  is  identified 

1  It  is  discussed  in  "  First  and  Last  Things,"  Book  IV,  §  4. 


XX  PREFACE 

with  God,  is  God ;  what  is  not  is  of  no  more  perma- 
nent valiie  than  the  snows  of  yester-year. 

H.  G.  W. 
Dimmow, 
May,  1917. 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

Preface ix 

1.  The  Cosmogony  op  Modern  Religion  ...  1 

2.  Heresies  ;  or  the  Things  that  God  is  Not  .     .  25 

3.  The  Likeness  op  God 55 

4.  The  Religion  of  Atheists 69 

5.  The  Invisible  King 96 

6.  Modern  Ideas  op  Sin  and  Damnation  .      .      .  145 

7.  The  Idea  of  a  Church 157 

The  Envoy 171 


GOD 
THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

CHAPTER  THE  FIRST 

THE  COSMOGONY  OP  MODERN 
RELIGION 

§  1  Modern  Religion  Has  no  Founder 
Perhaps  all  religions,  unless  the  flaming  onset  of 
Mohammedanism  be  an  exception,  have  dawned  im- 
perceptibly upon  the  world.  A  little  while  ago  and 
the  thing  was  not;  and  then  suddenly  it  has  been 
found  in  existence,  and  already  in  a  state  of  dif- 
fusion. People  have  begun  to  hear  of  the  new  be- 
lief first  here  and  then  there.  It  is  interesting,  for 
example,  to  trace  how  Christianity  drifted  into  the 
consciousness  of  the  Roman  world.  But  when  a 
religion  has  been  interrogated  it  has  always  had 
hitherto  a  tale  of  beginnings,  the  name  and  story 
of  a  founder.  The  renascent  religion  that  is  now 
taking  shape,  it  seems,  had  no  founder;  it  points 
to  no  origins.  It  is  the  Truth,  its  believers  declare ; 
it  has  always  been  here ;  it  has  always  been  visible 

1 


■2  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

to  those  who  had  eyes  to  see.  It  is  perhaps  plainer 
than  it  was  and  to  more  people  —  that  is  all. 

It  is  as  if  it  still  did  not  realise  its  own  differ- 
ence. Many  of  those  who  hold  it  still  think  of  it 
as  if  it  were  a  kind  of  Christianity.  Some,  catch- 
ing at  a  phrase  of  Huxley's,  speak  of  it  as  Chris- 
tianity without  Theology.  They  do  not  know  the 
creed  they  are  carrying.  It  has,  as  a  matter  of 
fact,  a  very  fine  and  subtle  theology,  flatly  opposed 
to  any  belief  that  could,  except  by  great  stretching 
of  charity  and  the  imagination,  be  called  Christian- 
ity. One  might  find,  perhaps,  a  parallelism  with 
the  system  ascribed  to  some  Gnostics,  but  that  is 
far  more  probably  an  accidental  rather  than  a  sym- 
pathetic coincidence.  Of  that  the  reader  shall 
presently  have  an  opportunity  of  judging. 

This  indefiniteness  of  statement  and  relationship 
is  probably  only  the  opening  phase  of  the  new  faith. 
Christianity  also  began  with  an  extreme  neglect  of 
definition.  It  was  not  at  first  anything  more  than 
a  sect  of  Judaism.  It  was  only  after  three  cen- 
turies, amidst  the  uproar  and  emotions  of  the  coun- 
cil of  Nicsea,  when  the  more  enthusiastic  Trinitari- 
ans stuffed  their  fingers  in  their  ears  in  affected 
horror  at  the  arguments  of  old  Arius,  that  the  car- 
dinal mystery  of  the  Trinity  was  established  as  the 


COSMOGONY  OF  MODERN  RELIGION     3 

essential  fact  of  Christianity.  Throughout  those 
three  centuries,  the  centuries  of  its  greatest  achieve- 
ments and  noblest  martyrdoms,  Christianity  had 
not  defined  its  God.  And  even  to-day  it  has  to  be 
noted  that  a  large  majority  of  those  who  possess 
and  repeat  the  Christian  creeds  have  come  into  the 
practice  so  insensibly  from  unthinking  childhood, 
that  only  in  the  slightest  way  do  they  realise  the 
nature  of  the  statements  to  which  they  subscribe. 
They  will  speak  and  think  of  both  Christ  and  God 
in  ways  flatly  incompatible  with  the  doctrine  of  the 
Triune  deity  upon  which,  theoretically,  the  entire 
fabric  of  all  the  churches  rests.  They  will  show 
themselves  as  frankly  Arians  as  though  that  damn- 
able heresy  had  not  been  washed  out  of  the  world 
forever  after  centuries  of  persecution  in  torrents 
of  blood.  But  whatever  the  present  state  of  Chris- 
tendom in  these  matters  may  be,  there  can  be  no 
doubt  of  the  enormous  pains  taken  in  the  past  to 
give  Christian  beliefs  the  exactest,  least  ambigu- 
ous statement  possible.  Christianity  knew  itself 
clearly  for  what  it  was  in  its  maturity,  whatever 
the  indecisions  of  its  childhood  or  the  confusions 
of  its  decay.  The  renascent  religion  that  one  finds 
now,  a  thing  active  and  sufficient  in  many  minds, 
has  still  scarcely  come  to  self-consciousness.     But 


4  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

it  is  so  coming,  and  this  present  book  is  very  largely 
an  attempt  to  state  the  shape  it  is  assuming  and  to 
compare  it  with  the  beliefs  and  imperatives  and 
usages  of  the  various  Christian,  pseudo-Christian, 
philosophical,  and  agnostic  cults  amidst  which  it 
has  appeared. 

The  writer's  sympathies  and  convictions  are  en- 
tirely with  this  that  he  speaks  of  as  renascent  or 
modern  religion ;  he  is  neither  atheist  nor  Buddhist 
nor  Mohammedan  nor  Christian.  He  will  make 
no  pretence,  therefore,  to  impartiality  and  detach- 
ment. He  will  do  his  best  to  be  as  fair  as  possible 
and  as  candid  as  possible,  but  the  reader  must 
reckon  with  this  bias.  He  has  found  this  faith 
growing  up  in  himself;  he  has  found  it,  or  some- 
thing very  difficult  to  distinguish  from  it,  growing 
independently  in  the  minds  of  men  and  women  he 
has  met.  They  have  been  people  of  very  various 
origins;  English,  Americans,  Bengalis,  Russians, 
French,  people  brought  up  in  a  "  Catholic  atmos- 
phere," Positivists,  Baptists,  Sikhs,  Mohammedans. 
Their  diversity  of  source  is  as  remarkable  as  their 
convergence  of  tendency.  A  miscellany  of  minds 
thinking  upon  parallel  lines  has  come  out  to  the 
same  light.  The  new  teaching  is  also  traceable  in 
many  professedly  Christian  religious  books  and  it 


COSMOGONY  OF  MODERN  RELIGION     5 

is  to  be  heard  from  Christian  pulpits.     The  phase 
of  definition  is  manifestly  at  hand. 

§  2  Modern  Religion  has  a  Finite  God 
Perhaps  the  most  fundamental  difference  between 
this  new  faith  and  any  recognised  form  of  Chris- 
tianity is  that,  knowingly  or  unknowingly,  it 
worships  a  finite  God.  Directly  the  believer  is 
fairly  confronted  with  the  plain  questions  of  the 
case,  the  vague  identifications  that  are  still  care- 
lessly made  with  one  or  all  of  the  persons  of  the 
Trinity  dissolve  away.  He  will  admit  that  his 
God  is  neither  all-wise,  nor  all-powerful,  nor  om- 
nipresent; that  he  is  neither  the  maker  of  heaven 
nor  earth,  and  that  he  has  little  to  identify  him  with 
that  hereditary  God  of  the  Jews  who  became  the 
"  Father  "  in  the  Christian  system.  On  the  other 
hand  he  will  assert  that  his  God  is  a  god  of  salva- 
tion, that  he  is  a  spirit,  a  person,  a  strongly  marked 
and  knowable  personality,  loving,  inspiring,  and 
lovable,  who  exists  or  strives  to  exist  in  every 
human  soul.  He  will  be  much  less  certain  in  his 
denials  that  his  God  has  a  close  resemblance  to  the 
Pauline  (as  distinguished  from  the  Trinitarian) 
"Christ."  .  .  . 

The  modern  religious  man  will  almost  certainly 


6  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

profess  a  kind  of  universalism ;  he  will  assert  that 
whensoever  men  have  called  upon  any  God  and  have 
found  fellowship  and  comfort  and  courage  and  that 
sense  of  God  within  them,  that  inner  light  which  is 
the  quintessence  of  the  religious  experience,  it  was 
the  True  God  that  answered  them.  For  the  True 
God  is  a  generous  God,  not  a  jealous  God ;  the  very 
antithesis  of  that  bickering  monopolist  who  "  will 
have  none  other  gods  but  Me  " ;  and  when  a  human 
heart  cries  out  —  to  what  name  it  matters  not  —  for 
a  larger  spirit  and  a  stronger  help  than  the  visible 
things  of  life  can  give,  straightway  the  nameless 
Helper  is  with  it  and  the  God  of  Man  answers  to 
the  call.  The  True  God  has  no  scorn  nor  hate  for 
those  who  have  accepted  the  many-handed  symbols 
of  the  Hindu  or  the  lacquered  idols  of  China. 
Where  there  is  faith,  where  there  is  need,  there  is 
the  True  God  ready  to  clasp  the  hands  that  stretch 
out  seeking  for  him  into  the  darkness  behind  the 
ivory  and  gold. 

The  fact  that  God  is  finite  is  one  upon  which  those 
who  think  clearly  among  the  new  believers  are  v^ry 
insistent.  He  is,  above  everything  else,  a  person- 
ality, and  to  be  a  personality  is  to  have  character- 
istics, to  be  limited  by  characteristics;  he  is  a  Be- 
ing, not  us  but  dealing  with  us  and  through  us, 


*i 


COSMOGONY  OF  MODERN  RELIGION     7 

he  has  an  aim  and  that  means  he  has  a  past  and 
future ;  he  is  within  time  and  not  outside  it.  And 
they  point  out  that  this  is  really  what  everyone 
who  prays  sincerely  to  God  or  gets  help  from  God, 
feels  and  believes.  Our  practice  with  God  is  better 
than  our  theory.  None  of  us  really  pray  to  that 
fantastic,  unqualified  danse  a  trois,  the  Trinity, 
which  the  wranglings  and  disputes  of  the  worthies 
of  Alexandria  and  Syria  declared  to  be  God.  We 
pray  to  one  single  understanding  person.  But  so 
far  the  tactics  of  those  Trinitarians  at  Nicsea,  who 
stuck  their  fingers  in  their  ears,  have  prevailed  in 
this  world ;  this  was  no  matter  for  discussion,  they 
declared,  it  was  a  Holy  Mystery  full  of  magical  ter- 
ror, and  few  religious  people  have  thought  it  worth 
while  to  revive  these  terrors  by  a  definite  contradic- 
tion. The  truly  religious  have  been  content  to 
lapse  quietly  into  the  comparative  sanity  of  an  un- 
formulated Arianism,  they  have  left  it  to  the  scof- 
fing Atheist  to  mock  at  the  patent  absurdities  of 
the  oflflcial  creed.  But  one  magnificent  protest 
against  this  theological  fantasy  must  have  been  the 
work  of  a  sincerely  religious  man,  the  cold  superb 
humour  of  that  burlesque  creed,  ascribed,  at  first 
no  doubt  facetiously  and  then  quite  seriously,  to 
Saint  Athanasius  the  Great,  which,  by  an  irony  far 


8  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

beyond  its  original  intention,  lias  become  at  last 
the  accepted  creed  of  the  church. 

The  long  truce  in  the  criticism  of  Trinitarian  the- 
ology is  drawing  to  its  end.  It  is  when  men  most 
urgently  need  God  that  they  become  least  patient 
with  foolish  presentations  and  dogmas.  The  new 
believers  are  very  definitely  set  upon  a  thorough 
analj'sis  of  the  nature  and  growth  of  the  Christian 
creeds  and  ideas.  There  has  grown  up  a  practice 
of  assuming  that,  when  God  is  spoken  of,  the  He- 
brew-Christian God  of  Nicsea  is  meant.  But  that 
God  trails  with  him  a  thousand  misconceptions 
and  bad  associations;  his  alleged  infinite  nature, 
his  jealousy,  his  strange  preferences,  his  vindictive 
Old  Testament  past.  These  things  do  not  even 
make  a  caricature  of  the  True  God;  they  compose 
an  altogether  different  and  antagonistic  figure. 

It  is  a  very  childish  and  unphilosophical  set  of 
impulses  that  has  led  the  theologians  of  nearly 
every  faith  to  claim  infinite  qualities  for  their  deity. 
One  has  to  remember  the  poorness  of  the  mental 
and  moral  quality  of  the  churchmen  of  the  third, 
fourth,  and  fifth  centuries  who  saddled  Christen- 
dom with  its  characteristic  dogmas,  and  the  extreme 
poverty  and  confusion  of  the  circle  of  ideas  within 
which   they  thought.     Many  of  these  makers  of 


COSMOGONY  OF  MODERN  RELIGION     9 

Christianity,  like  Saint  Ambrose  of  Milan  (who 
had  even  to  be  baptised  after  his  election  to  his 
bishopric),  had  been  pitchforked  into  the  church 
from  civil  life;  they  lived  in  a  time  of  pitiless  fac- 
tions and  personal  feuds ;  they  had  to  conduct  their 
disputations  amidst  the  struggles  of  would-be  em- 
perors; court  eunuchs  and  favourites  swayed  their 
counsels,  and  popular  rioting  clinched  their  de- 
cisions. There  was  less  freedom  of  discussion  then 
in  the  Christian  world  than  there  is  at  present 
(1916)  in  Belgium,  and  the  whole  audience  of  edu- 
cated opinion  by  which  a  theory  could  be  judged 
did  not  equal,  either  in  numbers  or  accuracy  of  in- 
formation, the  present  population  of  Constantino- 
ple. To  these  conditions  we  owe  the  claim  that 
the  Christian  God  is  a  magic  god,  very  great  medi- 
cine in  battle,  "  in  hoc  sigrw  vinces/'  and  the  argu- 
ment so  natural  to  the  minds  of  those  days  and  so 
absurd  to  ours,  that  since  he  had  all  power,  all 
knowledge,  and  existed  for  ever  and  ever,  it  was  no 
use  whatever  to  set  up  any  other  god  against 
him.  .  .  . 

By  the  fifth  century  Christianity  had  adopted  as 
its  fundamental  belief,  without  which  everyone  was 
to  be  "  damned  everlastingly,"  a  conception  of  God 
and  of  Christ's  relation  to  God,  of  which  even  by 


10  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

the  Christian  account  of  his  teaching,  Jesus  was 
either  totally  unaware  or  so  negligent  and  careless 
of  the  future  comfort  of  his  disciples  as  scarcely  to 
make  mention.  The  doctrine  of  the  Trinity,  so  far 
as  the  relationshij)  of  the  Third  Person  goes,  hangs 
almost  entirely  upon  one  ambiguous  and  disputed 
utterance  in  St.  John's  gospel  (xv.  26).  Most  of 
the  teachings  of  Christian  orthodoxy  resolve  them- 
selves to  the  attentive  student  into  assertions  of  the 
nature  of  contradiction  and  repartee.  Someone 
floats  an  opinion  in  some  matter  that  has  been 
hitherto  vague,  in  regard,  for  example,  to  the  son- 
ship  of  Christ  or  to  the  method  of  his  birth.  The 
new  opinion  arouses  the  hostility  and  alarm  of 
minds  unaccustomed  to  so  definite  a  statement,  and 
in  the  zeal  of  their  recoil  they  fly  to  a  contrary 
proposition.  The  Christians  would  neither  admit 
that  they  worshipped  more  gods  than  one  because 
of  the  Greeks,  nor  deny  the  divinity  of  Christ  be- 
cause of  the  Jews.  They  dreaded  to  be  polytheis- 
tic ;  equally  did  they  dread  the  least  apparent  de- 
traction from  the  power  and  importance  of  their 
Saviour.  They  w^ere  forced  into  the  theory  of  the 
Trinity  by  the  necessity  of  those  contrary  asser- 
tions, and  they  had  to  make  it  a  mystery  protected 
by  curses  to  save  it  from  a  reductio  ad  ahsurdum. 


COSMOGONY  OF  MODERN  RELIGION     11 

The  entire  history  of  the  growth  of  the  Christian 
doctrine  in  those  disordered  early  centuries  is  a 
history  of  theology  by  committee ;  a  history  of  furi- 
ous wrangling,  of  hasty  compromises,  and  still 
more  hasty  attempts  to  clinch  matters  by  ana- 
thema. When  the  muddle  was  at  its  very  worst, 
the  church  was  confronted  by  enormous  political 
opportunities.  In  order  that  it  should  seize  these 
one  chief  thing  appeared  imperative :  doctrinal  uni- 
formity. The  emperor  himself,  albeit  unbaptised 
and  very  ignorant  of  Greek,  came  and  seated  him- 
self in  the  midst  of  Christian  thought  upon  a  golden 
throne.  At  the  end  of  it  all  Eusebius,  that  su- 
preme Trimmer,  was  prepared  to  damn  everlast- 
ingly all  those  w^ho  doubted  that  consubstantiality 
he  himself  had  doubted  at  the  beginning  of  the  con- 
ference. It  is  quite  clear  that  Constantine  did  not 
care  who  was  damned  or  for  what  period,  so  long 
as  the  Christians  ceased  to  wrangle  among  them- 
selves. The  practical  unanimity  of  Nicsea  was  se- 
cured by  threats,  and  then,  turning  upon  the  vic- 
tors, he  sought  by  threats  to  restore  Arius  to  com- 
munion. The  imperial  aim  was  a  common  faith 
to  unite  the  empire.  The  crushing  out  of  the 
Arians  and  of  the  Paulicians  and  suchlike  heretics, 
and  more  particularly  the  systematic  destruction 


12  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

by  the  orthodox  of  all  heretical  writings,  had  about 
it  none  of  that  quality  of  honest  conviction  which 
comes  to  those  who  have  a  real  knowledge  of  God; 
it  was  a  bawling  down  of  dissensions  that,  left  to 
work  themselves  out,  would  have  spoilt  good  busi- 
ness ;  it  was  the  fist  of  Nicolas  of  Myra  over  again, 
except  that  after  the  days  of  Ambrose  the  sword 
of  the  executioner  and  the  fires  of  the  book-burner 
were  added  to  the  weapon  of  the  human  voice. 
Priscillian  was  the  first  human  sacrifice  formally 
offered  up  under  these  improved  conditions  to  the 
greater  glory  of  the  reinforced  Trinity.  There- 
after the  blood  of  the  heretics  was  the  cement  of 
Christian  unity. 

It  is  with  these  things  in  mind  that  those  who  pro- 
fess the  new  faith  are  becoming  so  markedly  anxious 
to  distinguish  God  from  the  Trinitarian's  deity.  At 
present  if  anyone  who  has  left  the  Christian  com- 
munion declares  himself  a  believer  in  God,  priest 
and  parson  swell  with  self-complacency.  There  is 
no  reason  why  they  should  do  so.  That  many  of 
us  have  gone  from  them  and  found  God  is  no  con- 
cern of  theirs.  It  is  not  that  we  who  went  out  into 
the  wilderness  which  we  thought  to  be  a  desert, 
away  from  their  creeds  and  dogmas,  have  turned 
back  and  are  returning.     It  is  that  we  have  gone 


COSMOGONY  OF  MODERN  RELIGION     13 

on  still  further,  and  are  beyond  that  desolation. 
Never  more  shall  we  return  to  those  who  gather 
under  the  cross.  By  faith  we  disbelieved  and  de- 
nied. By  faith  we  said  of  that  stuffed  scarecrow 
of  divinity,  that  incoherent  accumulation  of  antique 
theological  notions,  the  Nicene  deity,  "  This  is  cer- 
tainly no  God."  And  by  faith  we  have  found 
God.  .  .  . 

§  3  The  Infinite  Being  is  not  God 
There  has  always  been  a  demand  upon  the  theolog- 
ical teacher  that  he  should  supply  a  cosmogony. 
It  has  always  been  an  effective  propagandist  thing 
to  say:  '^ Our  God  made  the  whole  universe. 
Don't  you  think  that  it  would  be  wise  to  abandon 
your  deity,  who  did  not,  as  you  admit,  do  anything 
of  the  sort?" 

The  attentive  reader  of  the  lives  of  the  Saints 
will  find  that  this  style  of  argument  did  in 
the  past  bring  many  tribes  and  nations  into  the 
Christian  fold.  It  was  second  only  to  the  claim 
of  magic  advantages,  demonstrated  by  a  free  use 
of  miracles.  Only  one  great  religious  system,  the 
Buddhist,  seems  to  have  resisted  the  temptation 
to  secure  for  its  divinity  the  honour  and  title  of 
Creator.     Modern    religion    is   like    Buddhism   in 


14  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

that  respect.  It  offers  no  theory  whatever  about 
the  origin  of  the  universe.  It  does  not  reach  be- 
hind the  a^jpearances  of  space  and  time.  It  sees 
only  a  featureless  presumption  in  that  playing  with 
superlatives  which  has  entertained  so  many  minds 
from  Plotinus  to  the  Hegelians  with  the  delusion 
that  such  negative  terms  as  the  Absolute  or  the 
Unconditioned,  can  assert  anything  at  all.  At  the 
back  of  all  known  things  there  is  an  impenetrable 
curtain ;  the  ultimate  of  existence  is  a  Veiled  Being, 
which  seems  to  know  nothing  of  life  or  death  or 
good  or  ill.  Of  that  Being,  whether  it  is  simple  or 
complex  or  divine,  we  know  nothing;  to  us  it  is 
no  more  than  the  limit  of  understanding,  the  un- 
known beyond.  It  may  be  of  practically  limit- 
less intricacy  and  possibility.  The  new  religion 
does  not  pretend  that  the  God  of  its  life  is  that 
Being,  or  that  he  has  any  relation  of  control  or 
association  with  that  Being.  It  does  not  even 
assert  that  God  knows  all  or  much  more  than  we 
do  about  that  ultimate  Being. 

For  us  life  is  a  matter  of  our  personalities  in 
space  and  time.  Human  analysis  probing  with 
philosophy  and  science  towards  the  Veiled  Being 
reveals  nothing  of  God,  reveals  space  and  time 
only  as  necessary  forms  of  consciousness,  glimpses 


COSMOGONY  OF  MODEKN  RELIGION     15 

a  dance  of  atoms,  of  whirls  in  the  ether.  Some 
day  in  the  endless  future  there  may  be  a  knowledge, 
an  understanding  of  relationship,  a  power  and 
courage  that  will  pierce  into  those  black  wrap- 
pings. To  that  it  may  be  our  God,  the  Captain  of 
Mankind  will  take  us. 

That  now  is  a  mere  speculation.  The  veil  of 
the  unknown  is  set  with  the  stars;  its  outer  tex- 
ture is  ether  and  atom  and  crystal.  The  Veiled 
Being,  enigmatical  and  incomprehensible,  broods 
over  the  mirror  upon  which  the  busy  shapes  of  life 
are  moving.  It  is  as  if  it  waited  in  a  great  still- 
ness. Our  lives  do  not  deal  with  it,  and  cannot 
deal  with  it.  It  may  be  that  they  may  never  be 
able  to  deal  with  it. 

§  4  The  Life  Force  is  not  God 
So  it  is  that  comprehensive  setting  of  the  uni- 
verse presents  itself  to  the  modern  mind.  It  is 
altogether  outside  good  and  evil  and  love  and  hate. 
It  is  outside  God,  who  is  love  and  goodness.  And 
coming  out  of  this  veiled  being,  proceeding  out 
of  it  in  a  manner  altogether  inconceivable,  is  an- 
other lesser  being,  an  impulse  thrusting  through 
matter  and  clothing  itself  in  continually  changing 
material  forms,  the  maker  of  our  world,  Life,  the 


16  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

Will  to  Be.  It  comes  out  of  that  inscrutable  being 
as  a  wave  comes  rolling  to  us  from  beyond  the 
horizon.  It  is  as  it  were  a  great  wave  rushing 
through  matter  and  possessed  by  a  spirit.  It  is  a 
breeding,  fighting  thing;  it  pants  through  the 
jungle  track  as  the  tiger  and  lifts  itself  towards 
heaven  as  the  tree;  it  is  the  rabbit  bolting  for  its 
life  and  the  dove  calling  to  her  mate;  it  crawls, 
it  flies,  it  dives,  it  lusts  and  devours,  it  pursues 
and  eats  itself  in  order  to  live  still  more  eagerly 
and  hastily;  it  is  every  living  thing,  of  it  are  our 
passions  and  desires  and  fears.  And  it  is  aware 
of  itself  not  as  a  whole,  but  dispersedly  as  indi- 
vidual self-consciousness,  starting  out  dispersedly 
from  every  one  of  the  sentient  creatures  it  has 
called  into  being.  They  look  out  for  their  little 
moments,  red-eyed  and  fierce,  full  of  greed,  full  of 
the  passions  of  acquisition  and  assimilation  and 
reproduction,  submitting  only  to  brief  fellowships 
of  defence  or  aggression.  They  are  beings  of  strain 
and  conflict  and  competition.  They  are  living  sub- 
stance still  mingled  painfully  with  the  dust.  The 
forms  in  which  this  being  clothes  itself  bear  thorns 
and  fangs  and  claws,  are  soaked  with  poison  and 
bright  with  threats  or  allurements,  prey  slyly  or 
openly  on  one  another,  hold  their  own  for  a  little 


COSMOGONY  OF  MODERN  RELIGION     17 

while,     breed     savagely     and     resentfully,     and 
pass.  .  .  . 

This  second  Being  men  have  called  the  Life 
Force,  the  Will  to  Live,  the  Struggle  for  Exist- 
ence. They  have  figured  it  too  as  Mother  Nature. 
We  may  speculate  whether  it  is  not  what  the  wiser 
among  the  Gnostics  meant  by  the  Demiurge,  but 
since  the  Christians  destroyed  all  the  Gnostic 
books  that  must  remain  a  mere  curious  guess.  We 
may  speculate  whether  this  heat  and  haste  and 
wrath  of  life  about  us  is  the  Dark  God  of  the 
Manichees,  the  evil  spirit  of  the  sun  worshippers. 
But  in  contemporary  thought  there  is  no  convic- 
tion apparent  that  this  Demiurge  is  either  good 
or  evil;  it  is  conceived  of  as  both  good  and  evil. 
If  it  gives  all  the  pain  and  conflict  of  life,  it  gives 
also  the  joy  of  the  sunshine,  the  delight  and  hope 
of  youth,  the  pleasures.  If  it  has  elaborated  a 
hundred  thousand  sorts  of  parasite,  it  has  also 
moulded  the  beautiful  limbs  of  man  and  woman; 
it  has  shaped  the  slug  and  the  flower.  And  in  it, 
as  part  of  it,  taking  its  rewards,  responding  to  its 
goads,  struggling  against  tlie  final  abandonment  to 
death,  do  we  all  live,  as  the  beasts  live,  glad,  angry, 
sorry,  revengeful,  hopeful,  weary,  disgusted,  for- 
getful, lustful,  happy,  excited,  bored,  in  pain,  mood 


18  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

after  mood  but  always  fearing  death,  with  no  cer- 
tainty and  no  coherence  within  us,  until  we  find 
God.  And  God  comes  to  us  neither  out  of  the  stars 
nor  out  of  the  pride  of  life,  but  as  a  still  small  voice 
within. 

§  5  God  is  Within 
God  comes  we  know  not  whence,  into  the  con- 
flict of  life.  He  works  in  men  and  through  men. 
He  is  a  spirit,  a  single  spirit  and  a  single  per- 
son ;  he  has  begun  and  he  will  never  end.  He  is  the 
immortal  part  and  leader  of  mankind.  He  has 
motives,  he  has  characteristics,  he  has  an  aim. 
He  is  by  our  poor  scales  of  measurement  boundless 
love,  boundless  courage,  boundless  generosity.  He 
is  thought  and  a  steadfast  will.  He  is  our  friend 
and  brother  and  the  light  of  the  world.  That 
briefly  is  the  belief  of  the  modern  mind  with  regard 
to  God.  There  is  no  very  novel  idea  about  this 
God,  unless  it  be  the  idea  that  he  had  a  beginning. 
This  is  tlie  God  that  men  have  sought  and  found 
in  all  ages,  as  God  or  as  the  Messiah  or  the  Saviour 
The  finding  of  him  is  salvation  from  the  purpose 
lessness  of  life.  The  new  religion  has  but  disen 
tangled  the  idea  of  him  from  the  absolutes  and  in 
finities  and  mysteries  of  the  Christian  theologians; 


COSMOGONY  OF  MODEEN  RELIGION     19 

from  mythological  virgin  births  and  the  cosmog- 
onies and  intellectual  pretentiousness  of  a  vanished 
age. 

Modern  religion  appeals  to  no  revelation,  no 
authoritative  teaching,  no  mystery.  The  state- 
ment it  makes  is,  it  declares,  a  mere  statement  of 
what  we  may  all  i)erceive  and  exi3erience.  We  all 
live  in  the  storm  of  life,  we  all  find  our  understand- 
ings limited  by  the  Veiled  Being;  if  we  seek  salva- 
tion and  search  within  for  God,  presently  we  find 
him.  All  this  is  in  the  nature  of  things.  If  every 
one  who  perceives  and  states  it  were  to  be  instantly 
killed  and  blotted  out,  presently  other  people  would 
find  their  way  to  the  same  conclusions;  and  so  on 
again  and  again.  To  this  all  true  religion,  cast- 
ing aside  its  hulls  of  misconception,  must  ulti- 
mately come.  To  it  indeed  much  religion  is  al- 
ready coming.  Christian  thought  struggles  to- 
wards it,  with  the  millstones  of  Syrian  theology 
and  an  outrageous  mythology  of  incarnation  and 
resurrection  about  its  neck.  When  at  last  our 
present  bench  of  bishops  join  the  early  fathers  of 
the  church  in  heaven  there  will  be,  I  fear,  a  note 
of  reproach  in  their  greeting  of  the  ingenious  per- 
son who  saddled  them  with  omnipotens.  Still 
more  disastrous  for  them  has  been  the  virgin  birth, 


20  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

with  the  terrible  fascination  of  its  detail  for  un- 
poetic  minds.  How  rjeh  is  the  literature  of  au- 
thoritative Christianity  with  decisions  upon  the 
continuing  virginity  of  Mary  and  the  virginity  of 
Joseph  —  ideas  that  first  arose  in  Arabia  as  a  Mos- 
lem gloss  upon  Christianity  —  and  how  little  have 
these  peepings  and  pryings  to  do  with  the  needs  of 
the  heart  and  the  finding  of  God ! 

Within  the  last  few  years  there  have  been  a 
score  or  so  of  such  volumes  as  that  recently  com- 
piled by  Dr.  Foakes  Jackson,  entitled  "  The  Faith 
and  the  War/'  a  volume  in  which  the  curious  reader 
may  contemplate  deans  and  canons,  divines  and 
church  dignitaries,  men  intelligent  and  enquiring 
and  religiously  disposed,  all  lying  like  overladen 
camels,  panting  under  this  load  of  obsolete  theolog- 
ical responsibility,  groaning  great  articles,  outside 
the  needle's  eye  that  leads  to  God. 

§  G  The  Coming  of  God 
Modern  religion  bases  its  knowledge  of  God 
and  its  account  of  God  entirely  upon  experience. 
It  has  encountered  God.  It  does  not  argue  about 
God;  it  relates.  It  relates  without  any  of  those 
wrappings  of  awe  and  reverence  that  fold  so  neces- 
sarily about  imposture,  it  relates  as  one  tells  of  a 


COSMOGONY  OF  MODERN  RELIGION     21 

friend  and  his  assistance,  of  a  happy  adventure, 
of  a  beautiful  thing  found  and  picked  up  by  the 
wayside. 

So  far  as  its  psychological  phases  go  the  new 
account  of  personal  salvation  tallies  very  closely 
with  the  account  of  "  conversion  "  as  it  is  given 
by  other  religions.  It  has  little  to  tell  that  is  not 
already  familiar  to  the  reader  of  William  James's 
"  Varieties  of  Religious  Experience."  It  describes 
an  initial  state  of  distress  with  the  aimlessness  and 
cruelties  of  life,  and  particularly  with  the  futility 
of  the  individual  life,  a  state  of  helpless  self-dis- 
gust, of  inability  to  form  any  satisfactory  plan  of 
living.  This  is  the  common  prelude  known  to 
many  sorts  of  Christian  as  "  conviction  of  sin  " ; 
it  is,  at  any  rate,  a  conviction  of  hopeless  confu- 
sion. .  .  .  Then  in  some  way  the  idea  of  God  comes 
into  the  distressed  miud,  at  first  simply  as  an  idea, 
without  substance  or  belief.  It  is  read  about  or  it 
is  remembered;  it  is  expounded  by  some  teacher 
or  some  happy  convert.  In  the  case  of  all  those 
of  the  new  faith  with  whose  personal  experience  I 
have  any  intimacy,  the  idea  of  God  has  remained 
for  some  time  simply  as  an  idea  floating  about  in 
a  mind  still  dissatisfied.  God  is  not  believed  in, 
but  it  is  realised  that  if  there  w^ere  such  a  being  he 


22  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

would  supply  the  needed  consolation  and  direc- 
tion, his  continuing  purpose  would  knit  together 
the  scattered  effort  of  life,  his  immortality  would 
take  the  sting  from  death.  Under  this  realisation 
the  idea  is  pursued  and  elaborated.  For  a  time 
there  is  a  curious  resistance  to  the  suggestion  that 
God  is  truly  a  person;  he  is  spoken  of  preferably 
by  such  phrases  as  the  Purpose  in  Things,  as  the 
Kacial  Consciousness,  as  the  Collective  Mind. 

I  believe  that  this  resistance  in  so  many  con- 
temporary minds  to  the  idea  of  God  as  a  person 
is  due  very  largely  to  the  enormous  prejudice 
against  divine  personality  created  by  the  absurdi- 
ties of  the  Christian  teaching  and  the  habitual  mo- 
nopoly of  the  Christian  idea.  The  picture  of 
Christ  as  the  Good  Shepherd  thrusts  itself  be- 
fore minds  unaccustomed  to  the  idea  that  they  are 
lambs.  The  cross  in  the  twilight  bars  the  way. 
It  is  a  novelty  and  an  enormous  relief  to  such  peo- 
ple to  realise  that  one  may  think  of  God  without 
being  committed  to  think  of  either  the  Father,  the 
Son,  or  the  Holy  Ghost,  or  of  all  of  them  at  once. 
That  freedom  had  not  seemed  possible  to  them. 
They  had  been  hypnotised  and  obsessed  by  the  idea 
that  the  Christian  God  is  the  only  thinkable  God. 
They  had  heard  so  much  about  that  God  and  so 


COSMOGONY  OF  MODERN  RELIGION     23 

little  of  any  other.  With  that  release  their  minds 
become,  as  it  were,  nascent  and  ready  for  the  com- 
ing of  God. 

Then  suddenly,  in  a  little  while,  in  his  own  time, 
God  comes.  This  cardinal  experience  is  an  un- 
doubting,  immediate  sense  of  God.  It  is  the  at- 
tainment of  an  absolute  certainty  that  one  is  not 
alone  in  oneself.  It  is  as  if  one  was  touched  at 
every  point  by  a  being  akin  to  oneself,  sympathetic, 
beyond  measure  wiser,  steadfast  and  pure  in  aim. 
It  is  completer  and  more  intimate,  but  it  is  like 
standing  side  by  side  with  and  touching  someone 
that  we  love  very  dearly  and  trust  completely.  It 
is  as  if  this  being  bridged  a  thousand  misunder- 
standings and  brought  us  into  fellowship  with  a 
great  multitude  of  other  people.  .  .  . 

"  Closer  he  is  than  breathing,  and  nearer  than 
hands  and  feet." 

The  moment  may  come  while  we  are  alone  in 
the  darkness,  under  the  stars,  or  while  we  walk  by 
ourselves  or  in  a  crowd,  or  while  we  sit  and  muse. 
It  may  come  upon  the  sinking  ship  or  in  the  tu- 
mult of  the  battle.  There  is  no  saying  when  it  may 
not  come  to  us.  .  .  .  But  after  it  has  come  our 
lives  are  changed,  God  is  with  us  and  there  is  no 
more  doubt  of  God.     Thereafter  one  goes  about  the 


24  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

world  like  one  who  was  lonely  and  has  found  a 
lover,  like  one  who  was  perplexed  and  has  found  a 
solution.  One  is  assured  that  there  is  a  Powder  that 
fights  with  us  against  the  confusion  and  evil  within 
us  and  without.  There  comes  into  the  heart  an 
essential  and  enduring  happiness  and  courage. 

There  is  but  one  God,  there  is  but  one  true  reli- 
gious experience,  but  under  a  multitude  of  names, 
under  veils  and  darknesses,  God  has  in  this  man- 
ner come  into  countless  lives.  There  is  scarcely 
a  faith,  however  mean  and  preposterous,  that  has 
not  been  a  way  to  holiness.  God  who  is  himself 
finite,  who  himself  struggles  in  his  great  effort 
from  strength  to  strength,  has  no  spite  against  er- 
ror. Far  beyond  halfway  he  hastens  to  meet  the 
purblind.  But  God  is  against  the  darkness  in 
their  eyes.  The  faith  which  is  returning  to  men 
girds  at  veils  and  shadows,  and  would  see  God 
plainly.  It  has  little  respect  for  mysteries.  It 
rends  the  veil  of  the  temple  in  rags  and  tatters. 
It  has  no  superstitious  fear  of  this  huge  friendli- 
ness, of  this  great  brother  and  leader  of  our  little 
beings.  To  find  God  is  but  the  beginning  of  wis- 
dom, because  then  for  all  our  days  we  have  to  learn 
his  purpose  with  us  and  to  live  our  lives  with  him. 


CHAPTER  THE  SECOND 

HERESIES;  OR  THE  THINGS  THAT  GOD 
IS  NOT 

§  1  Heresies  are  Misconceptions  of  God 
Religion  is  uot  a  plant  that  has  grown  from  one 
seed;  it  is  like  a  lake  that  has  been  fed  by  count- 
less springs.  It  is  a  great  pool  of  living  water, 
mingled  from  many  sources  and  tainted  with  much 
impurity.  It  is  synthetic  in  its  nature ;  it  becomes 
simpler  from  original  complexities;  the  sediment 
subsides. 

A  life  perfectly  adjusted  to  its  surroundings  is 
a  life  without  mentality ;  no  judgment  is  called  for, 
no  inhibition,  no  disturbance  of  the  instinctive  flow 
of  perfect  reactions.  Such  a  life  is  bliss,  or  nir- 
vana. It  is  unconsciousness  below  dreaming. 
Consciousness  is  discord  evoking  the  will  to  adjust; 
it  is  inseparable  from  need.  At  every  need  con- 
sciousness breaks  into  being.  Imperfect  adjust- 
ments, needs,  are  the  rents  and  tatters  in  the 
smooth  dark  veil  of  being  through  which  the  light 

25 


26  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

of  consciousness  shines  —  the  light  of  conscious- 
ness and  will  of  which  God  is  the  sun. 

So  that  every  need  of  human  life,  every  disap- 
pointment and  dissatisfaction  and  call  for  help  and 
effort,  is  a  means  whereby  men  may  and  do  come 
to  the  realisation  of  God. 

There  is  no  cardinal  need,  there  is  no  sort  of 
experience  in  human  life  from  which  there  does  not 
come  or  has  not  come  a  contribution  to  men's  re- 
ligious ideas.  At  every  challenge  men  have  to  put 
forth  effort,  feel  doubt  of  adequacy,  be  thwarted, 
perceive  the  chill  shadow  of  their  mortality.  At 
every  challenge  comes  the  possibility  of  help  from 
without,  the  idea  of  eluding  frustration,  the  as- 
piration towards  immortality.  It  is  possible  to 
classify  the  appeals  men  make  for  God  under  the 
headings  of  their  chief  system  of  effort,  their  ef- 
forts to  understand,  their  fear  and  their  struggles 
for  safety  and  happiness,  the  craving  of  their  rest- 
lessness for  peace,  their  angers  against  disorder 
and  their  desire  for  the  avenger;  their  sexual  pas- 
sions and  perplexities.  .  .  . 

Each  of  these  great  systems  of  needs  and  efforts 
brings  its  own  sort  of  sediment  into  religion. 
Each,  that  is  to  say,  has  its  own  kind  of  heresy, 
its  distinctive  misapprehension  of  God.     It  is  only 


HERESIES  27 

in  the  synthesis  and  mutual  correction  of  many 
divergent  ideas  that  the  idea  of  God  grows  clear. 
The  effort  to  understand  completely,  for  example, 
leads  to  the  endless  Heresies  of  Theory.  Men  trip 
over  the  inherent  infirmities  of  the  human  mind. 
But  in  these  days  one  does  not  argue  greatly  about 
dogma.  Almost  every  conceivable  error  about 
unity,  about  personality,  about  time  and  quantity 
and  genus  and  species,  about  begetting  and  begin- 
ning and  limitation  and  similarity  and  every  kink 
in  the  difficult  mind  of  man,  has  been  thrust  for- 
ward in  some  form  of  dogma.  Beside  the  errors  of 
thought  are  the  errors  of  emotion.  Fear  and 
feebleness  go  straight  to  the  Heresies  that  God  is 
Magic  or  that  God  is  Providence;  restless  egotism 
at  leisure  and  unchallenged  by  urgent  elementary 
realities  breeds  the  Heresies  of  Mysticism,  anger 
and  hate  call  for  God's  Judgments,  and  the  stormy 
emotions  of  sex  gave  mankind  the  Phallic  God. 
Those  who  find  themselves  possessed  by  the  new 
spirit  in  religion,  realise  very  speedily  the  necessity 
of  clearing  the  mind  of  all  these  exaggerations, 
transferences,  and  overflows  of  feeling.  The  search 
for  divine  truth  is  like  gold  washing ;  nothing  is  of 
any  value  until  most  has  been  swept  away. 


28  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

§  2  Heresies  of  Speculation 
OxE  sort  of  heresies  stands  apart  from  the  rest. 
It  is  infinitely  the  most  various  sort.  It  includes 
all  those  heresies  which  result  from  wrong-headed 
mental  elaboration,  as  distinguished  from  those 
which  are  the  result  of  hasty  and  imperfect  appre- 
hension, the  heresies  of  the  clever  rather  than  the 
heresies  of  the  obtuse.  The  former  are  of  endless 
variety  and  complexity;  the  latter  are  in  compari- 
son natural,  simple  confusions.  The  former  are 
the  errors  of  the  study,  the  latter  the  superstitions 
that  spring  by  the  wayside,  or  are  brought  down 
to  us  in  our  social  structure  out  of  a  barbaric  past. 
To  the  heresies  of  thought  and  speculation  belong 
the  elaborate  doctrine  of  the  Trinity,  dogmas  about 
God's  absolute  qualities,  such  odd  deductions  as 
the  accepted  Christian  teachings  about  the  virginity 
of  Mary  and  Joseph,  and  the  like.  All  these  things 
are  parts  of  orthodox  Christianity.  Yet  none  of 
them  did  Christ,  even  by  the  Christian  account,  ex- 
pound or  recommend.  He  treated  them  as  negli- 
gible. It  was  left  for  the  Alexandrians,  for  Alex- 
ander, for  little,  red-haired,  busy,  wire-pulling  Ath- 
anasius  to  find  out  exactly  what  their  Master  was 
driving  at,  three  centuries  after  their  Master  was 
dead.  .  .  . 


HERESIES  29 

Men  still  sit  at  little  desks  remote  from  God  or 
life,  and  rack  their  inadequate  brains  to  meet  fan- 
cied difficulties  and  state  unnecessary  perfections. 
They  seek  God  by  logic,  ignoring  the  marginal  er- 
ror that  creeps  into  every  syllogism.  Their  conceit 
blinds  them  to  the  limitations  upon  their  thinking. 
They  weave  spider-like  webs  of  muddle  and  dispu- 
tation across  the  path  by  which  men  come  to  God. 
It  would  not  matter  very  much  if  it  were  not  that 
simpler  souls  are  caught  in  these  webs.  Every 
great  religious  system  in  the  world  is  choked  by 
such  webs;  each  system  has  its  own.  Of  all  the 
blood-stained  tangled  heresies  which  make  up  doc- 
trinal Christianity  and  imprison  the  mind  of  the 
western  world  to-day,  not  one  seems  to  have  been 
known  to  the  nominal  founder  of  Christianity. 
Jesus  Christ  never  certainly  claimed  to  be  the  Mes- 
siah ;  never  spoke  clearly  of  the  Trinity ;  was  vague 
upon  the  scheme  of  salvation  and  the  significance 
of  his  martyrdom.  We  are  asked  to  suppose  that 
he  left  his  apostles  without  instructions  that  were 
necessary  to  their  eternal  happiness,  that  he  could 
give  them  the  Lord's  Prayer  but  leave  them  to 
guess  at  the  all-important  Creed,^  and  that  the 

1  Even  the  "  Apostles'  Creed  "  is  not  traceable  earlier  than  the 
fourth  century.  It  is  manifestly  an  old,  patched  formulary. 
Rutinius  explains  that  it  was  not  written  down  for  a  long  time, 


30  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

Church  staggered  along  blindly,  putting  its  foot  in 
and  out  of  damnation,  until  the  "  experts  "  of  Ni- 
ca^a,  that  "  garland  of  priests,"  marshalled  by  Con- 
stantine's  officials,  came  to  its  rescue.  .  .  .  From 
the  conversion  of  Paul  onward,  the  heresies  of  the 
intellect  multiplied  about  Christ's  memory  and  hid 
him  from  the  sight  of  men.  We  are  no  longer  clear 
about  the  doctrine  he  taught  nor  about  the  things 
he  said  and  did.  .  .  . 

We  are  all  so  weary  of  this  theology  of  the  Chris- 
tians, we  are  all  at  heart  so  sceptical  about  their 
Triune  God,  that  it  is  needless  here  to  spend  any 
time  or  space  upon  the  twenty  thousand  different 
formulae  in  which  the  orthodox  have  attempted  to 
believe  in  something  of  the  sort.  There  are  several 
useful  encyclopasdias  of  sects  and  heresies,  compact, 
but  still  bulky,  to  which  the  curious  may  go.  There 
are  ten  thousand  different  expositions  of  orthodoxy. 
No  one  who  really  seeks  God  thinks  of  the  Trinity, 
either  the  Trinity  of  the  Trinitarian  or  the  Trinity 
of  the  Sabellian  or  the  Trinity  of  the  Arian,  any 
more  than  one  thinks  of  those  theories  made  stone, 
those  gods  with  three  heads  and  seven  hands,  who 
sit  on  lotus  leaves  and  flourish  lingams  and  what 

but  transmitted  orally,  kept  secret,  and  used  as  a  sort  of  pass- 
word among  the  elect. 


HERESIES  31 

not,  in  the  temples  of  India.  Let  us  leave,  there- 
fore, these  morbid  elaborations  of  the  human  in- 
telligence to  drift  to  limbo,  and  come  rather  to  the 
natural  heresies  that  spring  from  fundamental 
weaknesses  of  the  human  character,  and  which  are 
common  to  all  religions.  Against  these  it  is  neces- 
sary to  keep  constant  watch.  They  return  very 
insidiously. 

§  3    God  is  not  Magic 
One  of  the  most  universal  of  these  natural  mis- 
conceptions of  God  is  to  consider  him  as  something 
magic  serving  the  ends  of  men. 

It  is  not  easy  for  us  to  grasp  at  first  the  full  mean- 
ing of  giving  our  souls  to  God.  The  missionary 
and  teacher  of  any  creed  is  all  too  apt  to  hawk  God 
for  what  he  will  fetch ;  he  is  greedy  for  the  poor 
triumph  of  acquiescence;  and  so  it  comes  about 
that  many  people  who  have  been  led  to  believe  them- 
selves religious,  are  in  reality  still  keeping  back 
their  own  souls  and  trying  to  use  God  for  their  own 
purposes.  God  is  nothing  more  for  them  as  yet 
than  a  magnificent  Fetish.  They  did  not  really 
want  him,  but  they  have  heard  that  he  is  potent 
stuff;  their  unripe  souls  think  to  make  use  of  him. 
They  call  upon  his  name,  they  do  certain  things  that 


32  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

are  supposed  to  be  peculiarly  influential  with  him, 
such  as  saying  prayers  and  repeating  gross  praises 
of  him,  or  reading  in  a  blind,  industrious  way  that 
strange  miscellany  of  Jewish  and  early  Christian 
literature,  the  Bible,  and  suchlike  mental  mortifi- 
cation, or  making  the  Sabbath  dull  and  uncomfort- 
able. In  return  for  these  fetishistic  propitiations 
God  is  supposed  to  interfere  with  the  normal  course 
of  causation  in  their  favour.  He  becomes  a  celes- 
tial log-roller.  He  remedies  unfavourable  acci- 
dents, cures  petty  ailments,  contrives  unexpected 
gifts  of  medicine,  money,  or  the  like,  he  averts 
bankruptcies,  arranges  profitable  transactions,  and 
does  a  thousand  such  services  for  his  little  clique 
of  faithful  people.  The  pious  are  represented  as 
being  constantly  delighted  by  these  little  surprises, 
these  bouquets  and  chocolate  boxes  from  the  divin- 
ity. Or  contrawise  he  contrives  spiteful  turns  for 
those  who  fail  in  their  religious  attentions.  He 
murders  Sabbath-breaking  children,  or  disorgan- 
ises the  careful  business  schemes  of  the  ungodly. 
He  is  represented  as  going  Sabbath-breakering  on 
Sunday  morning  as  a  Staffordsliire  worker  goes 
ratting.  Ordinary  everyday  Christianity  is  satur- 
ated with  this  fetishistic  conception  of  God.  It 
may  be  disowned  in  The  Hihbert  Journal,  but  it  is 


HERESIES  33 

unblushinglj  advocated  in  the  parish  magazine. 
It  is  an  idea  taken  over  by  Christianity  with  the 
rest  of  the  qualities  of  the  Hebrew  God.  It  is 
natural  enough  in  minds  so  self-centred  that  their 
recognition  of  weakness  and  need  brings  with  it  no 
real  self-surrender,  but  it  is  entirely  inconsistent 
with  the  modern  conception  of  the  true  God. 

There  has  dropped  upon  the  table  as  I  write  a 
modest  periodical  called  The  Northern  British 
Israel  Review,  illustrated  with  portraits  of  various 
clergymen  of  the  Church  of  England,  and  of  ladies 
and  gentlemen  who  belong  to  the  little  school  of 
thought  which  this  magazine  represents;  it  is,  I 
should  judge,  a  sub-sect  entirely  within  the  Estab- 
lished Church  of  England,  that  is  to  say  within  the 
Anglican  communion  of  the  Trinitarian  Christians. 
It  contains  among  other  papers  a  very  entertaining 
summary  by  a  gentleman  entitled  —  I  cite  the  un- 
usual title-page  of  the  periodical  — "  Landseer 
Mackenzie,  Esq.,"  of  the  views  of  Isaiah,  Ezekiel, 
and  Obadiah  upon  the  Kaiser  William.  They  are 
distinctly  hostile  views.  Mr.  Landseer  Mackenzie 
discourses  not  only  upon  these  anticipatory  con- 
demnations but  also  upon  the  relations  of  the 
weather  to  this  war.  He  is  convinced  quite  simply 
and  honestly  that  God  has  been  persistently  rigging 


34  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

the  weather  against  the  Germans.  He  points  out 
that  the  absence  of  mist  on  the  North  Sea  was  of 
great  help  to  the  British  in  the  autumn  of  1914,  and 
declares  that  it  was  the  wet  state  of  the  country  that 
really  held  up  the  Germans  in  Flanders  in  the  win- 
ter of  1914-15.  He  ignores  the  part  played  by  the 
weather  in  delaying  the  relief  of  Kut-el-Amara,  and 
he  has  not  thought  of  the  difficult  question  why  the 
Deity,  having  once  decided  upon  intervention,  did 
not,  instead  of  this  comparatively  trivial  meteoro- 
logical assistance,  adopt  the  more  effective  course 
of,  for  example,  exploding  or  spoiling  the  German 
stores  of  ammunition  by  some  simple  atomic  mir- 
acle, or  misdirecting  their  gunfire  by  a  sudden  local 
modification  of  the  laws  of  refraction  or  gravita- 
tion. .  .  . 

Since  these  views  of  God  come  from  Anglican 
vicarages  I  can  only  conclude  that  this  kind  of  be- 
lief is  quite  orthodox  and  permissible  in  the  es- 
tablished church,  and  that  I  am  charging  orthodox 
Christianity  here  with  nothing  that  has  ever  been 
officially  repudiated.  I  find  indeed  the  essential 
assumptions  of  ^Mr.  Landseer  Mackenzie  repeated  in 
endless  official  Christian  utterances  on  the  part  of 
German  and  British  and  Eussian  divines.  The 
Bishop  of  Chelmsford,  for  example,  has  recently  as- 


HERESIES  35 

cribed  our  difficulties  in  tlie  war  to  our  impatience 
witli  long  sermons  —  among  other  similar  causes. 
Such  Christians  are  manifestly  convinced  that  God 
can  be  invoked  by  ritual  —  for  example  by  special 
days  of  national  prayer  or  an  increased  observance 
of  Sunday  —  or  made  malignant  by  neglect  or  lev- 
ity. It  is  almost  fundamental  in  their  idea  of  him. 
The  ordinary  Mohammedan  seems  as  confident  of 
this  magic  pettiness  of  God,  and  the  belief  of  China 
in  the  magic  propitiations  and  resentments  of 
"  Heaven  "  is  at  least  equally  strong. 

But  the  true  God  as  those  of  the  new  religion 
know  him  is  no  such  God  of  luck  and  intervention. 
He  is  not  to  serve  men's  ends  or  the  ends  of  nations 
or  associations  of  men;  he  is  careless  of  our  cere- 
monies and  invocations.  He  does  not  lose  his  tem- 
per with  our  follies  and  weaknesses.  It  is  for  us 
to  serve  Him.  He  captains  us,  he  does  not  coddle 
us.  He  has  his  own  ends  for  which  he  needs 
us.  .  .  . 

§  4    God  is  not  Providence 
Closely  related  to  this  heresy  that  God  is  magic, 
is  the  heresy  that  calls  him  Providence,  that  de- 
clares the  apparent  adequacy  of  cause  and  effect  to 
be  a  sham,  and  that  all  the  time,  incalculably,  he  is 


36  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

pulling  about  the  order  of  events  for  our  personal 
advantages. 

The  idea  of  Providence  was  very  gaily  travested 
by  Daudet  in  "  Tartarin  in  the  Alps."  You  will 
remember  how  Tartarin's  friend  assured  him  that 
all  Switzerland  was  one  great  Trust,  intent  upon 
attracting  tourists  and  far  too  wise  and  kind  to 
permit  them  to  venture  into  real  danger,  that  all 
the  precipices  were  netted  invisibly,  and  all  the 
loose  rocks  guarded  against  falling,  that  avalanches 
were  prearranged  spectacles  and  the  crevasses  at 
their  worst  slippery  ways  down  into  kindly  catch- 
ment bags.  If  the  mountaineer  tried  to  get  into 
real  danger  he  was  turned  back  by  specious  excuses. 
Inspired  by  this  persuasion  Tartarin  behaved  with 
incredible  daring.  .  .  .  That  is  exactly  the  Provi- 
dence theory  of  the  whole  world.  There  can  be  no 
doubt  that  it  does  enable  many  a  timid  soul  to  get 
through  life  with  a  certain  recklessness.  And  pro- 
vided there  is  no  slip  into  a  crevasse,  the  Providence 
theory  works  well.  It  would  work  altogether  well 
if  there  were  no  crevasses. 

Tartarin  was  reckless  because  of  his  faith  in 
Providence,  and  escaped.  But  what  would  have 
happened  to  him  if  he  had  fallen  into  a  crevasse? 

There  exists  a  very  touching  and   remarkable 


HERESIES  37 

book  by  Sir  Francis  Younghusband  called 
"  Within."  ^  It  is  the  confession  of  a  man  who 
lived  with  a  complete  confidence  in  Providence 
until  he  was  already  well  advanced  in  years. 
He  went  through  battles  and  campaigns,  he  filled 
positions  of  great  honour  and  responsibility,  he 
saw  much  of  the  life  of  men,  without  altogether 
losing  his  faith.  The  loss  of  a  child,  an  Indian 
famine,  could  shake  it  but  not  overthrow  it.  Then 
coming  back  one  day  from  some  races  in  France, 
he  was  knocked  clown  by  an  automobile  and  hurt 
very  cruelly.  He  suffered  terribly  in  body  and 
mind.  His  sufferings  caused  much  suffering  to 
others.  He  did  his  utmost  to  see  the  hand  of  a 
loving  Providence  in  his  and  their  disaster  and  the 
torment  it  inflicted,  and  being  a  man  of  sterling 
honesty  and  a  fine  essential  simplicity  of  mind,  he 
confessed  at  last  that  he  could  not  do  so.  His  con- 
fidence in  the  benevolent  intervention  of  God  was 
altogether  destroyed.  His  book  tells  of  this  shat- 
tering, and  how  labouriously  he  reconstructed  his 
religion  upon  less  confident  lines.  It  is  a  book 
typical  of  an  age  and  of  a  very  English  sort  of 
mind,  a  book  well  worth  reading. 

That  he  came  to  a  full  sense  of  the  true  God  can- 

1  Williams  aud  Norgate,  1912. 


38  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

not  be  asserted,  but  how  near  he  came  to  God,  let 
one  quotation  witness. 

"  The  existence  of  an  outside  Providence,"  he  writes, 
"  who  created  us,  who  watches  over  us,  and  who  guides 
our  lives  like  a  Merciful  Father,  we  have  found  impos- 
sible longer  to  believe  in.  But  of  the  existence  of  a 
Holy  Spirit  radiating  upward  through  all  animate  be- 
ings, and  finding  its  fullest  expression,  in  man  in  love, 
and  in  the  flowers  in  beauty,  we  can  be  as  certain  as  of 
anything  in  the  world.  This  fiery  spiritual  impulsion 
at  the  centre  and  the  source  of  things,  ever  burning  in 
us,  is  the  supremely  important  factor  in  our  existence. 
It  does  not  always  attain  to  light.  In  many  directions 
it  fails;  the  conditions  are  too  hard  and  it  is  utterly 
blocked.  In  others  it  only  partially  succeeds.  But  in  a 
few  it  bursts  forth  into  radiant  light.  There  are  few 
who  in  some  heavenly  moment  of  their  lives  have  not 
been  conscious  of  its  presence.  "We  may  not  be  able  to 
give  it  outward  expression,  but  we  know  that  it  is 
there."  .  .  . 

God  does  not  guide  our  feet.  He  is  no  sedulous 
governess  restraining  and  correcting  the  wayward 
steps  of  men.  If  you  would  fly  into  the  air,  there 
is  no  God  to  bank  your  aeroplane  correctly  for  you 
or  keep  an  ill-tended  engine  going;  if  you  would 
cross  a  glacier,  no  God  nor  angel  guides  your  steps 
amidst  the  slippery  places.  He  will  not  even  mind 
your  innocent  children  for  you  if  you  leave  them 


HERESIES  39 

before  an  unguarded  fire.  Cherish  no  delusions; 
for  yourself  and  others  you  challenge  danger  and 
chance  on  your  own  strength ;  no  talisman,  no  God, 
can  help  you  or  those  you  care  for.  Nothing  of 
such  things  will  God  do;  it  is  an  idle  dream.  But 
God  will  be  with  you  nevertheless.  In  the  reeling 
aeroplane  or  the  dark  ice-cave  God  will  be  your 
courage.  Though  you  suffer  or  are  killed,  it  is  not 
an  end.  He  will  be  with  you  as  you  face  death; 
he  will  die  with  you  as  he  has  died  already  count- 
less myriads  of  brave  deaths.  He  will  come  so 
close  to  you  that  at  the  last  you  will  not  know 
whether  it  is  you  or  he  who  dies,  and  the  present 
death  will  be  swallowed  up  in  his  victory. 

§  5  The  Heresy  of  Quietism 
God  comes  to  us  within  and  takes  us  for  his  own. 
He  releases  us  from  ourselves;  he  incorporates  us 
with  his  own  undying  experience  and  adventure; 
he  receives  us  and  gives  himself.  He  is  a  stimu- 
lant; he  makes  us  live  immortally  and  more  abun- 
dantly. I  have  compared  him  to  the  sensation  of 
a  dear,  strong  friend  who  comes  and  stands  quietly 
beside  one,  shoulder  to  shoulder. 

The  finding  of  God  is  the  beginning  of  service. 
It  is  not  an  escape  from  life  and  action;  it  is  the 


40  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

release  of  life  and  action  from  the  prison  of  the 
mortal  self.  Not  to  realise  that,  is  the  heresy  of 
Quietism,  of  many  mystics.  Commonly  such  peo- 
ple are  people  of  some  wealth,  able  to  command 
services  for  all  their  everyday  needs.  They  make 
religion  a  method  of  indolence.  They  turn  their 
backs  on  the  toil  and  stresses  of  existence  and  give 
themselves  up  to  a  delicious  reverie  in  which  they 
flirt  with  the  divinity.  They  will  recount  their 
privileges  and  ecstasies,  and  how  ingeniously  and 
wonderfully  God  has  tried  and  proved  them.  But 
indeed  the  true  God  was  not  the  lover  of  Madame 
Guyon.  The  true  God  is  not  a  spiritual  troubadour 
wooing  the  hearts  of  men  and  women  to  no  pur- 
pose. The  true  God  goes  through  the  world  like 
fifes  and  drums  and  flags,  calling  for  recruits 
along  the  street.  We  must  go  out  to  him.  We 
must  accept  his  discipline  and  fight  his  battle.  The 
peace  of  God  comes  not  by  thinking  about  it  but 
by  forgetting  oneself  in  him. 

§  6    God  does  not  Punish 
Man  is  a  social  animal,  and  there  is  in  him  a 
great  faculty  for  moral  indignation.     Many  of  the 
early  Gods  were  mainly  Gods  of  Fear.     They  were 
more  often  "  wrath  "  than  not.     Such  was  the  tem- 


HERESIES  41 

perament  of  the  Semitic  deity  who,  as  the  Hebrew 
Jehovah,  proliferated,  perhaps  under  the  influence 
of  the  Alexandrian  Serapeum,  into  the  Christian 
Trinity  and  who  became  also  the  Moslem  God.^ 
The  natural  hatred  of  unregenerate  men  against 
everything  that  is  unlike  themselves,  against 
strange  people  and  cheerful  people,  against  unfa- 
miliar usages  and  things  they  do  not  understand, 
embodied  itself  in  this  conception  of  a  malignant 
and  partisan  Deity,  perpetually  "  upset "  by  the 
little  things  people  did,  and  contriving  murder  and 
vengeance.  Now  this  God  would  be  drowning 
everybody  in  the  world,  now  he  would  be  burning 
Sodom  and  Gomorrah,  now  he  would  be  inciting 
his  congenial  Israelites  to  the  most  terrific  pog- 
roms. This  divine  "  frightfulness "  is  of  course 
the  natural  human  dislike  and  distrust  for  queer 

1  It  is  not  so  generally  understood  as  it  should  be  among 
English  and  American  readers  that  a  very  large  proportion  of 
early  Christians  before  the  creeds  established  and  regularised 
the  doctrine  of  the  Trinity,  denied  absolutely  that  Jehovah 
was  God ;  they  regarded  Christ  as  a  rebel  against  Jehovah 
and  a  rescuer  of  humanity  from  him,  just  as  Prometheus 
was  a  rebel  against  Jove.  These  beliefs  survived  for  a  thou- 
sand years  throughout  Christendom ;  they  were  held  by  a  great 
multitude  of  persecuted  sects,  from  the  Albigenses  and  Cathars 
to  the  eastern  Paulicians.  The  catholic  church  found  it  nec- 
essary to  prohibit  the  circulation  of  the  Old  Testament  among 
laymen  very  largely  on  account  of  the  polemics  of  the  Cathars 
against  the  Hebrew  God.  But  in  this  book,  be  it  noted,  the 
word  Chinstian,  when  it  is  not  otherwise  defined,  is  used  to 
indicate  only  the  Trinitarians  who  accept  the  official  creeds. 


42  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

practices  or  for  too  sunny  a  carelessness,  a  dislike 
reinforced  by  the  latent  fierceness  of  the  ape  in  us, 
liberating  the  latent  fierceness  of  the  ape  in  us,  giv- 
ing it  an  excuse  and  pressing  permission  upon  it, 
handing  the  thing  hated  and  feared  over  to  its  sec- 
ular arm.  .  .  . 

It  is  a  human  paradox  that  the  desire  for  seem- 
liness,  the  instinct  for  restraints  and  fair  disci- 
plines, and  the  impulse  to  cherish  sweet  familiar 
things,  that  these  things  of  the  Tt-ue  God  should 
so  readily  liberate  cruelty  and  tyranny.  It  is  like 
a  woman  going  with  a  light  to  tend  and  protect  her 
sleeping  child,  and  setting  the  house  on  fire.  None 
the  less,  right  down  to  to-day,  the  heresy  of  God 
the  Revengeful,  God  the  Persecutor  and  Avenger, 
haunts  religion.  It  is  only  in  quite  recent  years 
that  the  growing  gentleness  of  everyday  life  has 
begun  to  make  men  a  little  ashamed  of  a  Deity  less 
tolerant  and  gentle  than  themselves.  The  recent 
literature  of  the  Anglicans  abounds  in  the  evidence 
of  this  trouble. 

Bishop  Colenso  of  Natal  was  prosecuted  and  con- 
demned in  1863  for  denying  the  irascibility  of  his 
God  and  teaching  "  the  Kaffirs  of  Natal  "  the  dan- 
gerous heresy  that  God  is  all  mercy.  "  We  cannot 
allow  it  to  be  said,"  the  Dean  of  Cape  Town  in- 


HERESIES  43 

sistecl,  "  that  God  was  not  angry  and  was  not  ap- 
peased by  i)unishment."  He  was  angry  "  on  ac- 
count of  Sin,  which,  is  a  great  evil  and  a  great  in- 
sult to  His  Majesty."  The  case  of  the  Rev.  Charles 
Voysey,  which  occurred  in  1870,  was  a  second  as- 
sertion of  the  Church's  insistence  upon  the  fierce- 
ness of  her  God.  This  case  is  not  to  be  found  in 
the  ordinary  church  histories  nor  is  it  even  men- 
tioned in  the  latest  edition  of  the  Encyclopadia 
Britannica;  nevertheless  it  appears  to  have  been  a 
very  illuminating  case.  It  is  doubtful  if  the  church 
would  prosecute  or  condemn  either  Bishop  Colenso 
or  Mr.  Voysey  to-day. 

§  7  God  and  the  Nurseey-maid 
Closely  related  to  the  Heresy  of  God  the  Avenger, 
is  that  kind  of  miniature  God  the  Avenger,  to  whom 
the  nursery-maid  and  the  overtaxed  parent  are  so 
apt  to  appeal.  You  stab  your  children  with  such 
a  God  and  he  poisons  all  their  lives.  For  many  of 
us  the  word  "  God  "  first  came  into  our  lives  to 
denote  a  wanton,  irrational  restraint,  as  Bogey,  as 
the  All-Seeing  and  quite  ungenerous  Eye.  God 
Bogey  is  a  great  convenience  to  the  nursery-maid 
who  wants  to  leave  Fear  to  mind  her  charges  and 
enforce  her  disciplines,  while  she  goes  off  upon  her 


44  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

own  aims.  But  indeed,  the  teaching  of  God  Bogey 
is  an  outrage  upon  the  soul  of  a  child  scarcely  less 
dreadful  than  an  indecent  assault.  The  reason 
rebels  and  is  crushed  under  this  horrible  and  pur- 
suing suggestion.  Many  minds  never  rise  again 
from  their  injury.  They  remain  for  the  rest  of  life 
spii'itually  crippled  and  debased,  haunted  by  a  fear, 
stained  with  a  persuasion  of  relentless  cruelty  in 
the  ultimate  cause  of  all  things. 

I,  who  write,  was  so  set  against  God,  thus  ren- 
dered. He  and  his  Hell  were  the  nightmare  of  my 
childhood;  I  hated  him  while  I  still  believed  in 
him,  and  who  could  help  but  hate?  I  thought  of 
him  as  a  fantastic  monster,  perpetually  spying, 
perpetually  listening,  perpetually  waiting  to  con- 
demn and  to  "  strike  me  dead  " ;  his  flames  as  ready 
as  a  grill-room  fire.  He  was  over  me  and  about 
my  feebleness  and  silliness  and  forgetfulness  as  the 
sky  and  sea  would  be  about  a  child  drowning  in 
mid-Atlantic.  When  I  was  still  only  a  child  of 
thirteen,  by  the  grace  of  the  true  God  in  me,  I  flung 
this  Lie  out  of  my  mind,  and  for  many  years,  until 
I  came  to  see  that  God  himself  had  done  this  thing 
for  me,  the  name  of  God  meant  nothing  to  me  but 
the  hideous  scar  in  my  heart  where  a  fearful  demon 
had  been. 


HERESIES  45 

I  see  about  me  to-day  many  dreadful  moral  and 
mental  cripples  with  this  bogey  God  of  the  nursery- 
maid, with  his  black,  insane  revenges,  still  living 
like  a  horrible  parasite  in  their  hearts  in  the  place 
where  God  should  be.  They  are  afraid,  afraid, 
afraid;  they  dare  not  be  kindly  to  formal  sinners, 
they  dare  not  abandon  a  hundred  foolish  observ- 
ances; they  dare  not  look  at  the  causes  of  things. 
They  are  afraid  of  sunshine,  of  nakedness,  of  health, 
of  adventure,  of  science,  lest  that  old  watching 
spider  take  offence.  The  voice  of  the  true  God 
whispers  in  their  hearts,  echoes  in  speech  and  writ- 
ing, but  they  avert  themselves,  fear-driven.  For 
the  true  God  has  no  lash  of  fear.  And  how  the 
foul-minded  bigot,  with  his  ill -shaven  face,  his 
greasy  skin,  his  thick,  gesticulating  hands,  his  bel- 
lowings  and  threatenings,  loves  to  reap  this  harvest 
of  fear  the  ignorant  cunning  of  the  nursery  girl 
has  sown  for  him!  How  he  loves  the  importance 
of  denunciation,  and,  himself  a  malignant  cripple, 
to  rally  the  company  of  these  crippled  souls  to  per- 
secute and  destroy  the  happy  children  of  God !  .  .  . 

Christian  priestcraft  turns  a  dreadful  face  to 
children.  There  is  a  real  wickedness  of  the  priest 
that  is  different  from  other  wickedness,  and  that 
affects  a  reasonable  mind  just  as  cruelty  and  strange 


46  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

perversions  of  instinct  affect  it.  Let  a  former 
Archbishop  of  Canterbury  speak  for  me.  This  that 
follows  is  the  account  given  by  Archbishop  Tait 
in  a  debate  in  the  Upper  House  of  Convocation 
(July  3rd,  1877)  of  one  of  the  publications  of  a 
certain  Society  of  the  Holy  Cross: 

*'I  take  this  book,  as  its  contents  show,  to  be  meant 
for  the  instruction  of  very  young  children.  I  find,  in 
one  of  the  pages  of  it,  the  statement  that  between  the 
ages  of  six  and  six  and  a  half  years  would  be  the  proper 
time  for  the  inculcation  of  the  teaching  which  is  to  be 
found  in  the  book.  Now,  six  to  six  and  a  half  is  cer- 
tainly a  very  tender  age,  and  to  these  children  I  find 
these  statements  addressed  in  the  book: 

" '  It  is  to  the  priest,  and  to  the  priest  only,  that  the  child 
must  acknowledge  his  sins,  if  he  desires  that  God  should  for- 
give hiru.' 

' '  I  hope  and  trust  the  person,  the  three  clergymen,  or 
however  many  there  were,  did  not  exactly  realise  what 
they  were  writing;  that  they  did  not  mean  to  say  that  a 
child  was  not  to  confess  its  sins  to  God  direct;  that  it 
was  not  to  confess  its  sins,  at  the  age  of  six,  to  its 
mother,  or  to  its  father,  but  was  only  to  have  recourse 
to  the  priest.  But  the  words,  to  say  the  least  of  them, 
are  rash.     Then  comes  the  very  obvious  question : 

"'Do  you  know  why?  It  is  because  God,  when  he  was  on 
earth,  gave  to  his  priests,  and  to  them  alone,  the  Divine  Power 
of  forgiving  men  their  sins.  It  was  to  priests  alone  that  Jesus 
said :     "  Receive  ye  the  Holy  Ghost."  .  .  .  Those  who  will  not 


HERESIES  47 

confess  will  not  be  cured.     Sin  is  a  terrible  sickness,  and  casts 
souls  into  bell.' 

' '  That  is  addressed  to  a  child  six  years  of  age. 

" '  I  have  known,'  the  book  continues,  '  poor  children  who 
concealed  their  sins  in  confession  for  years ;  they  were  very 
unhappy,  were  tormented  with  remorse,  and  if  they  had  died 
in  that  state  they  would  certainly  have  gone  to  the  everlasting 
fires  of  hell.' "... 

Now  here  is  something  against  nature,  some- 
thing that  I  have  seen  time  after  time  in  the  faces 
and  bearing  of  priests  and  heard  in  their  preacMng. 
It  is  a  distinct  lust.  Much  nobility  and  devotion 
there  are  among  priests,  saintly  lives  and  kindly 
lives,  lives  of  real  worship,  lives  no  man  may  better ; 
this  that  I  write  is  not  of  all,  perhaps  not  of  many 
priests.  But  there  has  been  in  all  ages  that  have 
known  sacerdotalism  this  terrible  type  of  the  priest ; 
priestcraft  and  priestly  power  release  an  aggres- 
sive and  narrow  disposition  to  a  recklessness  of 
suffering  and  a  hatred  of  liberty  that  surely  ex- 
ceeds the  badness  of  any  other  sort  of  men. 

§  8    The  Children's  God 
Children  do  not  naturally  love  God.     They  have 
no  great  capacity  for  an  idea  so  subtle  and  mature 
as  the  idea  of  God.     While  they  are  still  children 
in  a  home  and  cared  for,  life  is  too  kind  and  easy 


48  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

for  them  to  feel  any  great  need  of  God.  All  things 
are  still  something  God-like.  .  .  . 

The  true  God,  our  modern  minds  insist  upon 
believing,  can  have  no  appetite  for  unnatural 
praise  and  adoration.  He  does  not  clamour  for 
the  attention  of  children.  He  is  not  like  one  of 
those  senile  uncles  who  dream  of  glory  in  the  nurs- 
ery, who  love  to  hear  it  said,  "  The  children  adore 
him."  If  children  are  loved  and  trained  to  truth, 
justice,  and  mutual  forbearance,  they  will  be  ready 
for  the  true  God  as  their  needs  bring  them  within 
his  scope.  They  should  be  left  to  their  innocence, 
and  to  their  trust  in  the  innocence  of  the  world,  as 
long  as  they  can  be.  They  should  be  told  only  of 
God  as  a  Great  Friend  whom  some  day  they  will 
need  more  and  understand  and  know  better.  That 
is  as  much  as  most  children  need.  The  phrases  of 
religion  put  too  early  into  their  mouths  may  be- 
come a  cant,  something  worse  than  blasphemy. 

Yet  children  are  sometimes  very  near  to  God. 
Creative  passion  stirs  in  their  play.  At  times  they 
display  a  divine  simplicity.  But  it  does  not  follow 
that  therefore  they  should  be  afflicted  with  theolog- 
ical formulae  or  inducted  into  ceremonies  and  rites 
that  they  may  dislike  or  misinterpret.  If  by  any 
accident,  by  the  death  of  a  friend  or  a  distressing 


HERESIES  49 

story,  the  thought  of  death  afflicts  a  child,  then  he 
may  begin  to  hear  of  God,  who  takes  those  that 
serve  him  out  of  their  slain  bodies  into  his  shining 
immortality.  Or  if  by  some  menial  treachery, 
through  some  prowling  priest,  the  whisper  of  Old 
Bogey  reaches  our  children,  then  we  may  set  their 
minds  at  ease  by  the  assurance  of  his  limitless  char- 
ity. .  .  . 

With  adolescence  comes  the  desire  for  God  and  to 
know  more  of  God,  and  that  is  the  most  suitable 
time  for  religious  talk  and  teaching. 

§  9  God  is  not  Sexual 
In  the  last  two  or  three  hundred  years  there  has 
been  a  very  considerable  disentanglement  of  the 
idea  of  God  from  the  complex  of  sexual  thought 
and  feeling.  But  in  the  early  days  of  religion  the 
two  things  were  inseparably  bound  together;  the 
fury  of  the  Hebrew  prophets,  for  example,  is  con- 
tinually proclaiming  the  extraordinary  "  wrath  " 
of  their  God  at  this  or  that  little  dirtiness  or  irregu- 
larity or  breach  of  the  sexual  tabus.  The  cere- 
mony of  circumcision  is  clearly  indicative  of  the 
original  nature  of  the  Semitic  deity  who  developed 
into  the  Trinitarian  God.  So  far  as  Christianity 
dropped  this  rite,  so  far  Christianity  disavowed 


50  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

the  old  associations.  But  to  this  day  the  repre- 
sentative Christian  churches  still  make  marriage 
into  a  mystical  sacrament,  and,  with  some  excep- 
tions, the  Roman  communion  exacts  the  sacrifice 
of  celibacy  from  its  priesthood,  regardless  of  the 
mischievousness  and  maliciousness  that  so  often 
ensue.  Nearly  every  Christian  church  inflicts  as 
much  discredit  and  injustice  as  it  can  contrive 
upon  the  illegitimate  child.  They  do  not  treat 
illegitimate  children  as  unfortunate  children,  but 
as  children  with  a  mystical  and  an  incurable  taint 
of  sin.  Kindly  easy-going  Christians  may  resent 
this  statement  because  it  does  not  tally  with  their 
own  attitudes,  but  let  them  consult  their  orthodox 
authorities. 

One  must  distinguish  clearly  here  between  what 
is  held  to  be  sacred  or  sinful  in  itself  and  what  is 
held  to  be  one's  duty  or  a  nation's  duty  because  it 
is  in  itself  the  wisest,  cleanest,  clearest,  best  thing 
to  do.  By  the  latter  tests  and  reasonable  argu- 
ments most  or  all  of  our  institutions  regulating 
the  relations  of  the  sexes  may  be  justifiable.  But 
my  case  is  not  whether  they  can  be  justified  by  these 
tests  but  that  it  is  not  by  these  tests  that  they  are 
judged  even  to-day,  by  the  professors  of  the  chief 
religions  of  the  world.     It  is  the  temper  and  not 


HERESIES  51 

the  conclusions  of  the  religious  bodies  that  I  would 
criticise.  These  sexual  questions  are  guarded  by 
a  holy  irascibility,  and  the  most  violent  efforts  are 
made  —  with  a  sense  of  complete  righteousness  — 
to  prohibit  their  discussion.  That  fury  about  sex- 
ual things  is  only  to  be  explained  on  the  hypothesis 
that  the  Christian  God  remains  a  sex  God  in  the 
minds  of  great  numbers  of  his  exponents.  His 
disentanglement  from  that  plexus  is  incomplete. 
Sexual  things  are  still  to  the  orthodox  Christian, 
sacred  things. 

Now  the  God  whom  those  of  the  new  faith  are 
finding  is  only  mediately  concerned  with  the  rela- 
tions of  men  and  women.  He  is  no  more  sexual 
essentially  than  he  is  essentially  dietetic  or  hy- 
gienic. The  God  of  Leviticus  was  all  these  things. 
He  is  represented  as  prescribing  the  most  petty  and 
intimate  of  observances  —  many  of  which  are  now 
habitually  disregarded  by  the  Christians  who  pro- 
fess him.  ...  It  is  part  of  the  evolution  of  the  idea 
of  God  that  we  have  now  so  largely  disentangled 
our  conception  of  him  from  the  dietary  and  regi- 
men and  meticulous  sexual  rules  that  were  once 
inseparably  bound  up  with  his  majesty.  Christ 
himself  was  one  of  the  chief  forces  in  this  disen- 
tanglement, there  is  the  clearest  evidence  in  several 


52  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

instances  of  his  disregard  of  the  rule  and  his  in- 
sistence that  his  disciples  should  seek  for  the  spirit 
underlying  and  often  masked  by  the  rule.  His 
Church,  being  made  of  baser  matter,  has  followed 
him  as  reluctantly  as  possible  and  no  further  than 
it  was  obliged.  But  it  has  followed  him  far  enough 
to  admit  his  principle  that  in  all  these  matters 
there  is  no  need  for  superstitious  fear,  that  the  in- 
terpretation of  the  divine  purpose  is  left  to  the  un- 
embarrassed intelligence  of  men.  The  church  has 
followed  him  far  enough  to  make  the  harsh  threat- 
enings  of  priests  and  ecclesiastics  against  what 
they  are  pleased  to  consider  impurity  or  sexual  im- 
piety, a  profound  inconsistency.  One  seems  to 
hear  their  distant  protests  when  one  reads  of 
Christ  and  the  Magdalen,  or  of  Christ  eating  with 
publicans  and  sinners.  The  clergy  of  our  own 
days  play  the  part  of  the  New  Testament  Pharisees 
with  the  utmost  exactness  and  complete  uncon- 
sciousness. One  cannot  imagine  a  modern  ecclesi- 
astic conversing  with  a  Magdalen  in  terms  of  or- 
dinary civility,  unless  she  was  in  a  very  high  social 
position  indeed,  or  blending  with  disreputable  char- 
acters without  a  dramatic  sense  of  condescension 
and  much  explanatory  by-play.  Those  who  pro- 
fess modern  religion  do  but  follow  in  these  matters 


HERESIES  53 

a  course  entirely  compatible  with  what  has  sur- 
vived of  the  authentic  teachings  of  Christ,  when 
they  declare  that  God  is  not  sexual,  and  that  re- 
ligious passion  and  insult  and  persecution  upon  the 
score  of  sexual  things  are  a  barbaric  inheritance. 

But  lest  anyone  should  fling  off  here  with  some 
hasty  assumption  that  those  who  profess  the  re- 
ligion of  the  true  God  are  sexually  anarchistic,  let 
stress  be  laid  at  once  upon  the  opening  sentence 
of  the  preceding  paragrajjh,  and  let  me  a  little  an- 
ticipate a  section  which  follows.  We  would  free 
men  and  women  from  exact  and  superstitious  rules 
and  observances,  not  to  make  them  less  the  instru- 
ments of  God  but  more  wholly  his.  The  claim  of 
modern  religion  is  that  one  should  give  oneself  un- 
reservedly to  God,  that  there  is  no  other  salvation. 
The  believer  owes  all  his  being  and  every  mo- 
ment of  his  life  to  God,  to  keep  mind  and  body  as 
clean,  fine,  wholesome,  active  and  completely  at 
God's  service  as  he  can.  There  is  no  scope  for  in- 
dulgence or  dissipation  in  such  a  consecrated  life. 
It  is  a  matter  between  the  individual  and  his  con- 
science or  his  doctor  or  his  social  understanding 
what  exactly  he  may  do  or  not  do,  what  he  may  eat 
or  drink  or  so  forth,  upon  any  occasion.  Nothing 
can  exonerate  him  from  doing  his  utmost  to  deter- 


54  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

mine  and  perform  the  right  act.  Nothing  can  ex- 
cuse his  failure  to  do  so.  But  what  is  here  being 
insisted  upon  is  that  none  of  these  things  has  im- 
mediately to  do  with  God  or  religious  emotion,  ex- 
cept only  the  general  will  to  do  right  in  God's 
service.  The  detailed  interpretation  of  that 
"right"  is  for  the  dispassionate  consideration  of 
the  human  intelligence. 

All  this  is  set  down  here  as  distinctly  as  pos- 
sible. Because  of  the  emotional  reservoirs  of  sex, 
sexual  dogmas  are  among  the  most  obstinately  re- 
current of  all  heresies,  and  sexual  excitement  is  al- 
ways tending  to  leak  back  into  religious  feeling. 
Amongst  the  sex-tormented  priesthood  of  the  Ro- 
man communion  in  particular,  ignorant  of  the  ex- 
treme practices  of  the  Essenes  and  of  the  Orphic 
cult  and  suchlike  predecessors  of  Christianity, 
there  seems  to  be  an  extraordinary  belief  that 
chastity  was  not  invented  until  Christianity  came, 
and  that  the  religious  life  is  largely  the  propitiation 
of  God  by  feats  of  sexual  abstinence.  But  a  super- 
stitious abstinence  that  scars  and  embitters  the 
mind,  distorts  the  imagination,  makes  the  body 
gross  and  keeps  it  unclean,  is  just  as  offensive  to 
God  as  any  positive  depravity. 


CHAPTER  THE  THIRD 

THE  LIKENESS  OF  GOD 

§  1  God  is  Courage 
Now  having  set  down  what  those  who  profess  the 
new  religion  regard  as  the  chief  misconceptions  of 
God,  having  put  these  systems  of  ideas  aside  from 
our  explanations,  the  path  is  cleared  for  the  state- 
ment of  what  God  is.  Since  language  springs 
entirely  from  material,  spatial  things,  there  is 
always  an  element  of  metaphor  in  theological  state- 
ment. So  that  I  have  not  called  this  chapter  the 
Nature  of  God,  but  the  Likeness  of  God. 
And  firstly,  God  is  Courage. 

§  2    God  is  a  Person 
And  next  God  is  a  Person. 

Upon  this  point  those  who  are  beginning  to  pro- 
fess modern  religion  are  very  insistent.  It  is,  they 
declare,  the  central  article,  the  axis,  of  their  re- 
ligion. God  is  a  person  who  can  be  known  as  one 
knows  a  friend,  who  can  be  served  and  who  receives 
service,  who  partakes  of  our  nature;  who  is,  like 

55 


56  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

us,  a  being  in  conflict  with  the  unknown  and  the 
limitless  and  the  forces  of  death ;  who  values  much 
that  we  value  and  is  against  much  that  we  are  pit- 
ted against.  He  is  our  king  to  whom  we  must  be 
loyal ;  he  is  our  captain,  and  to  know  him  is  to  have 
a  direction  in  our  lives.  He  feels  us  and  knows  us ; 
he  is  helped  and  gladdened  by  us.  He  hopes  and 
attempts.  .  .  .  God  is  no  abstraction  nor  trick  of 
words,  no  Infinite.  He  is  as  real  as  a  bayonet 
thrust  or  an  embrace. 

Now  this  is  where  those  who  have  left  the  old 
creeds  and  come  asking  about  the  new  realisations 
find  their  chief  difficulty.  They  say,  Show  us  this 
person ;  let  us  hear  him.  ( If  they  listen  to  the  si- 
lences within,  presently  they  will  hear  him. )  But 
when  one  argues,  one  finds  oneself  suddenly  in  the 
net  of  those  ancient  controversies  between  species 
and  individual,  between  the  one  and  the  many, 
which  arise  out  of  the  necessarily  imperfect  meth- 
ods of  the  human  mind.  Upon  these  matters  there 
has  been  much  pregnant  writing  during  the  last 
half  century.  Such  ideas  as  this  writer  has  to  of- 
fer are  to  be  found  in  a  previous  little  book  of  his, 
"  First  and  Last  Things,"  in  which,  writing  as  one 
without  authority  or  specialisation  in  logic  and 
philosophy,  as  an  ordinary  man  vividly  interested. 


THE  LIKENESS  OF  GOD  57 

for  others  in  a  like  case,  he  was  at  some  pains  to  elu- 
cidate the  imperfections  of  this  instrument  of  ours, 
this  mind,  by  which  we  must  seek  and  explain  and 
reach  up  to  God.  Suffice  it  here  to  say  that  theo- 
logical discussion  may  very  easily  become  like  the 
vision  of  a  man  with  cataract,  a  mere  projection  of 
inherent  imperfections.  If  we  do  not  use  our 
phraseology  with  a  certain  courage,  and  take  that  of 
those  who  are  trying  to  convey  their  ideas  to  us  with 
a  certain  politeness  and  charity,  there  is  no  end  pos- 
sible to  any  discussion  in  so  subtle  and  intimate  a 
matter  as  theology  but  assertions,  denials,  and 
wranglings.  And  about  this  word  "  person  "  it  is 
necessary  to  be  as  clear  and  explicit  as  possible, 
though  perfect  clearness,  a  definition  of  mathe- 
matical sharpness,  is  by  the  very  nature  of  the  case 
impossible. 

Now  when  we  speak  of  a  person  or  an  individual 
we  think  typically  of  a  m'^n,  and  we  forget  that 
he  was  once  an  embryo  and  will  presently  decay; 
we  forget  that  he  came  of  two  people  and  may  be- 
get many,  that  he  has  forgotten  much  and  will  for- 
get more,  that  he  can  be  confused,  divided  against 
himself,  delirious,  drunken,  drugged,  or  asleep.  On 
the  contrary  we  are,  in  our  hasty  way  of  thinking 
of  him,  apt  to  suppose  him  continuous,  definite. 


58  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

acting  consisteutl}'  and  never  forgetting.  But  only 
abstract  and  theoretical  persons  are  like  that.  We 
couple  with  him  the  idea  of  a  body.  Indeed,  in  the 
common  use  of  the  word  "  person  "  there  is  more 
thought  of  body  than  of  mind.  We  speak  of  a  lover 
possessing  the  person  of  his  mistress.  We  speak  of 
offences  against  the  person  as  opposed  to  insults, 
libels,  or  offences  against  property.  And  the  gods 
of  primitive  men  and  the  earlier  civilisations  w^ere 
quite  of  that  quality  of  person.  They  were  thought 
of  as  living  in  very  splendid  bodies  and  as  acting 
consistently.  If  they  were  invisible  in  the  ordi- 
nary world  it  was  because  they  were  aloof  or  be- 
cause their  "  persons  "  were  too  splendid  for  weak 
human  eyes.  Moses  w^as  permitted  a  mitigated 
view  of  the  person  of  the  Hebrew  God  on  Mount 
Horeb;  and  Semele,  who  insisted  upon  seeing  Zeus 
in  the  glories  that  were  sacred  to  Juno,  was  utterly 
consumed.  The  early  Islamic  conception  of  God, 
like  the  conception  of  most  honest,  simple  Chris- 
tians to-day,  was  clearly,  in  spite  of  the  theologians, 
of  a  very  exalted  anthropomorphic  personality  away 
somewhere  in  Heaven.  The  personal  appearance 
of  the  Christian  God  is  described  in  The  Revelation, 
and  however  much  that  description  may  be  ex- 
plained away  by  commentators  as  symbolical,  it  is 


I 


THE  LIKENESS  OF  GOD  59 

certainly  taken  by  most  straightforward  believers 
as  a  statement  of  concrete  reality.  Now  if  we  are 
going  to  insist  upon  this  primary  meaning  of  per- 
son and  individual,  then  certainly  God  as  he  is  now 
conceived  is  not  a  person  and  not  an  individual. 
The  true  God  will  never  promenade  an  Eden  or  a 
Heaven,  nor  sit  upon  a  throne. 

But  current  Christianity,  modern  developments 
of  Islam,  much  Indian  theological  thought  —  that, 
for  instance,  which  has  found  such  delicate  and 
attractive  expression  in  the  devotional  poetry  of 
Rabindranath  Tagore  —  has  long  since  abandoned 
this  anthropomorphic  insistence  upon  a  body. 
From  the  earliest  ages  man's  mind  has  found  little 
or  no  difficulty  in  the  idea  of  something  essential 
to  the  personality,  a  soul  or  a  spirit  or  both,  ex- 
isting apart  from  the  body  and  continuing  after 
the  destruction  of  the  body,  and  being  still  a  person 
and  an  individual.  From  this  it  is  a  small  step  to 
the  thought  of  a  person  existing  independently  of 
any  existing  or  pre-existing  body.  That  is  the  idea 
of  theological  Christianity,  as  distinguished  from 
the  Christianity  of  simple  faith.  The  Triune  Per- 
sons —  omnipresent,  omniscient,  and  omnipotent  — 
exist  for  all  time,  superior  to  and  independent  of 
matter.     They   are   supremely   disembodied.     One 


60  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

became  incarnate  —  as  a  wind  eddy  might  take  up 
a  whirl  of  dust.  .  .  .  Those  who  xjrofess  modern 
religion  conceive  that  this  is  an  excessive  abstrac- 
tion of  the  idea  of  spirituality,  a  disembodiment  of 
the  idea  of  personality  beyond  the  limits  of  the 
conceivable;  nevertheless  they  accept  the  concep- 
tion that  a  person,  a  spiritual  individual,  may  be 
without  an  ordinary  mortal  body.  .  .  .  They  de- 
clare that  God  is  without  any  specific  body,  that 
he  is  immaterial,  that  he  can  affect  the  material 
universe  —  and  that  means  that  he  can  only  reach 
our  sight,  our  hearing,  our  touch  —  through  the 
bodies  of  those  who  believe  in  him  and  serve  him. 

His  nature  is  of  the  nature  of  thought  and  w^ill. 
Not  only  has  he,  in  his  essence,  nothing  to  do  with 
matter,  but  nothing  to  do  w^ith  space.  He  is  not 
of  matter  nor  of  space.  He  comes  into  them. 
Since  the  period  when  all  the  great  theologies  that 
prevail  to-day  were  developed,  there  have  been  great 
changes  in  the  ideas  of  men  towards  the  dimen- 
sions of  time  and  space.  We  owe  to  Kant  the  re- 
lease from  the  rule  of  these  ideas  as  essential  ideas. 
Our  modern  psychology  is  alive  to  the  possibility 
of  Being  that  has  no  extension  in  space  at  all,  even 
as  our  speculative  geometry  can  entertain  the  pos- 
sibility of  dimensions  —  fourth,  fifth,  nth  dimen- 


THE  LIKENESS  OF  GOD  61 

sions  —  outside  the  three-dimensional  universe  of 
our  experience.  And  God  being  non-spatial  is  not 
thereby  banished  to  an  infinite  remoteness,  but 
brought  nearer  to  us ;  he  is  everywhere  immediately 
at  hand,  even  as  a  fourth  dimension  would  be  every- 
w^here  immediately  at  hand.  He  is  a  Being  of  the 
minds  and  in  the  minds  of  men.  He  is  in  immedi- 
ate contact  with  all  who  apprehend  him.  .  .  . 

But  modern  religion  declares  that  though  he 
does  not  exist  in  matter  or  space,  he  exists  in  time 
just  as  a  current  of  thought  may  do ;  that  he  changes 
and  becomes  more  even  as  a  man's  purpose  gathers 
itself  together;  that  somewhere  in  the  dawning  of 
mankind  he  had  a  beginning,  an  awakening,  and 
that  as  mankind  grows  he  grows.  With  our  eyes 
he  looks  out  upon  the  universe  he  invades;  with 
our  hands,  he  lays  hands  upon  it.  All  our  truth, 
all  our  intentions  and  achievements,  he  gathers  to 
himself.  He  is  the  undying  human  memory,  the 
increasing  human  will. 

But  this,  you  may  object,  is  no  more  than  saying 
that  God  is  the  collective  mind  and  purpose  of  the 
human  race.  You  may  declare  that  this  is  no  God, 
but  merely  the  sum  of  mankind.  But  those  who 
believe  in  the  new  ideas  very  steadfastly  deny 
that.     God  is,  they  say,  not  an  aggregate  but  a  syn- 


62  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

thesis.  He  is  not  merely  the  best  of  all  of  us,  but 
a  Being  in  himself,  composed  of  that  but  more  than 
that,  as  a  temple  is  more  than  a  gathering  of  stones, 
or  a  regiment  is  more  than  an  accumulation  of 
men.  They  point  out  that  a  man  is  made  up  of  a 
great  multitude  of  cells,  0ach  equivalent  to  a  uni- 
cellular organism.  Not  one  of  those  cells  is  he, 
nor  is  he  simply  just  the  addition  of  all  of  them. 
He  is  more  than  all  of  them.  You  can  take  away 
these  and  these  and  these,  and  he  still  remains. 
And  he  can  detach  part  of  himself  and  treat  it  as 
if  it  were  not  himself,  just  as  a  man  may  beat  his 
breast  or,  as  Cranmer  the  martyr  did,  thrust  his 
hand  into  the  flames.  A  man  is  none  the  less  him- 
self because  his  hair  is  cut  or  his  appendix  removed 
or  his  leg  amputated. 

And  take  another  image.  .  .  .  Who  bears  affec- 
tion for  this  or  that  spadeful  of  mud  in  my  garden? 
Who  cares  a  throb  of  the  heart  for  all  the  tons  of 
chalk  in  Kent  or  all  the  lumps  of  limestone  in 
Yorkshire?  But  men  love  England,  which  is  made 
up  of  such  things. 

And  so  we  think  of  God  as  a  synthetic  reality, 
though  he  has  neither  body  nor  material  parts. 
And  so  too  we  may  obey  him  and  listen  to  him, 
though  we  think  but  lightly  of  the  men  whose 


THE  LIKENESS  OF  GOD  63 

hands  or  voices  he  sometimes  uses.  And  we  may 
think  of  him  as  having  moods  and  aspects  —  as  a 
man  has  —  and  a  consistency  we  call  his  character. 
These  are  theorisings  about  God.  These  are 
statements  to  convey  this  modern  idea  of  God. 
This,  we  say,  is  the  nature  of  the  person  whose  will 
and  thoughts  we  serve.  No  one,  however,  who  un- 
derstands the  religious  life  seeks  conversion  by 
argument.  First  one  must  feel  the  need  of  God, 
then  one  must  form  or  receive  an  acceptable  idea 
of  God.  That  much  is  no  more  than  turning  one's 
face  to  the  east  to  see  the  coming  of  the  sun.  One 
may  still  doubt  if  that  direction  is  the  east  or 
whether  the  sun  will  rise.  The  real  coming  of  God 
is  not  that.  It  is  a  change,  an  irradiation  of  the 
mind.  Everything  is  there  as  it  was  before,  only 
now  it  is  aflame.  Suddenly  the  light  fills  one's 
eyes,  and  one  knows  that  God  has  risen  and  that 
doubt  has  fled  for  ever. 

§  3    God  is  Youth 
The  third  thing  to  be  told  of  the  true  God  is  that 
God  is  Youth. 

God,  we  hold,  began  and  is  always  beginning. 
He  looks  forever  into  the  future. 

Most  of  the  old  religions  derive  from  a  patriar- 


64  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

chal  phase.  God  is  in  those  sj^stems  the  Ancient 
of  Days.  I  know  of  no  Christian  attempt  to  repre- 
sent or  symbolise  God  the  Father  which  is  not  a 
bearded,  aged  man.  White  hair,  beard,  bearing, 
wrinkles,  a  hundred  such  s^^mptoms  of  senile  decay 
are  there.  These  marks  of  senility  do  not  astonish 
our  modern  minds  in  the  picture  of  God,  only  be- 
cause tradition  and  usage  have  blinded  our  eyes 
to  the  absurdity  of  a  time-worn  immortal.  Jove 
too  and  Wotan  are  figures  far  past  the  prime  of 
their  vigour.  These  are  gods  after  the  ancient 
habit  of  the  human  mind,  that  turned  perpetually 
backward  for  causes  and  reasons  and  saw  all  things 
to  come  as  no  more  than  the  working  out  of  Fate, — 

"Of  IMan's  first  disobedience  and  the  fruit 
Of  that  forbidden  tree,  whose  mortal  taste 
Brought  death  into  the  world  and  all  our  woe." 

But  the  God  of  this  new  age,  we  repeat,  looks 
not  to  our  past  but  our  future,  and  if  a  figure  may 
represent  him  it  must  be  the  figure  of  a  beautiful 
youth,  already  brave  and  wise,  but  hardly  come  to 
his  strength.  He  should  stand  lightly  on  his  feet 
in  the  morning  time,  eager  to  go  forward,  as  though 
he  had  but  newly  arisen  to  a  day  that  was  still  but 
a  promise ;  he  should  bear  a  sword,  that  clean,  dis- 


THE  LIKENESS  OF  GOD  65 

criminating  weapon,  his  eyes  should  be  as  bright 
as  swords ;  his  lips  should  fall  apart  with  eagerness 
for  the  great  adventure  before  him,  and  he  should 
be  in  very  fresh  and  golden  harness,  reflecting  the 
rising  sun.  Death  should  still  hang  like  mists  and 
cloud  banks  and  shadows  in  the  valle^^s  of  the  wide 
landscape  about  him.  There  should  be  dew  upon 
the  threads  of  gossamer  and  little  leaves  and  blades 
of  the  turf  at  his  feet.  .  .  . 

§  4  When  we  say  God  is  Love 
One  of  the  sayings  about  God  that  have  grown 
at  the  same  time  most  trite  and  most  sacred,  is  that 
God  is  Love.  This  is  a  saying  that  deserves  care- 
ful examination.  Love  is  a  word  very  loosely  used ; 
there  are  people  who  will  say  they  love  new  pota- 
toes ;  there  are  a  multitude  of  loves  of  different  col- 
ours and  values.  There  is  the  love  of  a  mother  for 
her  child,  there  is  the  love  of  brothers,  there  is  the 
love  of  youth  and  maiden,  and  the  love  of  husband 
and  wife,  there  is  illicit  love  and  the  love  one  bears 
one's  home  or  one's  country,  there  are  dog-lovers 
and  the  loves  of  the  Olympians,  and  love  which  is 
a  passion  of  jealousy.  Love  is  frequently  a  mere 
blend  of  appetite  and  preference ;  it  may  be  almost 
pure  greed;  it  may  have  scarcely  any  devotion  nor 


66  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

be  a  whit  self -forgetful  nor  generous.  It  is  pos- 
sible so  to  phrase  things  that  the  furtive  craving 
of  a  man  for  another  man's  wife  may  be  made  out 
to  be  a  light  from  God.  Yet  about  all  the  better 
sorts  of  love,  the  sorts  of  love  that  people  will  call 
"  true  love,"  there  is  something  of  that  same  ex- 
altation out  of  the  narrow  self  that  is  the  essential 
quality  of  the  knowledge  of  God. 

Only  while  the  exaltation  of  the  love  passion 
comes  and  goes,  the  exaltation  of  religious  passion 
comes  to  remain.  Lovers  are  the  windows  by  which 
we  may  look  out  of  the  prison  of  self,  but  God  is 
the  open  door  by  which  we  freely  go.  And  God 
never  dies,  nor  disappoints,  nor  betrays. 

The  love  of  a  woman  and  a  man  has  usually,  and 
particularly  in  its  earlier  phases  of  excitement,  far 
too  much  desire,  far  too  much  possessiveness  and 
exclusiveness,  far  too  much  distrust  or  forced  trust, 
and  far  too  great  a  kindred  with  jealousy  to  be  like 
the  love  of  God.  The  former  is  a  dramatic  rela- 
tionship that  drifts  to  a  climax,  and  then  again 
seeks  presently  a  climax,  and  that  may  be  satiated 
or  fatigued.  But  the  latter  is  far  more  like  the 
love  of  comrades,  or  like  the  love  of  a  man  and  a 
woman  who  have  loved  and  been  through  much 
trouble  together,  who  have  hurt  one  another  and 


THE  LIKENESS  OF  GOD  67 

forgiven,  and  come  to  a  complete  and  generous 
fellowship.  There  is  a  strange  and  beautiful  love 
that  men  tell  of  that  will  spring  up  on  battlefields 
between  sorely  wounded  men,  and  often  they  are 
men  who  have  fought  together,  so  that  they  will  do 
almost  incredibly  brave  and  tender  things  for  one 
another,  though  but  recently  they  have  been  trying 
to  kill  each  other.  There  is  often  a  pure  exaltation 
of  feeling  between  those  who  stand  side  by  side  man- 
fully in  any  great  stress.  These  are  the  forms  of 
love  that  perhaps  come  nearest  to  what  we  mean 
when  we  speak  of  the  love  of  God. 

That  is  man's  love  of  God,  but  there  is  also  some- 
thing else;  there  is  the  love  God  bears  for  man  in 
the  individual  believer.  Now  this  is  not  an  indul- 
gent, instinctive,  and  sacrificing  love  like  the  love  of 
a  woman  for  her  baby.  It  is  the  love  of  the  captain 
for  his  men ;  God  must  love  his  followers  as  a  great 
captain  loves  his  men,  who  are  so  foolish,  so  help- 
less in  themselves,  so  confiding,  and  yet  whose  faith 
alone  makes  him  possible.  It  is  an  austere  love. 
The  spirit  of  God  will  not  hesitate  to  send  us  to 
torment  and  bodily  death.  .  .  . 

And  God  waits  for  us,  for  all  of  us  who  have  the 
quality  to  reach  him.  He  has  need  of  us  as  we  of 
him.     He  desires  us  and  desires  to  make  himself 


68  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

known  to  us.  When  at  last  the  individual  breaks 
through  the  limiting  darknesses  to  him,  the  irra- 
diation of  that  moment,  the  smile  and  soul  clasp, 
is  in  God  as  well  as  in  man.  He  has  won  us  from 
his  enemy.  We  come  staggering  through  into  the 
golden  light  of  his  kingdom,  to  fight  for  his  king- 
dom henceforth,  until  at  last  we  are  altogether 
taken  up  into  his  being. 


CHAPTER  THE  FOURTH 

THE  RELIGION  OF  ATHEISTS 

§  1  The  Scientific  Atheist 
It  is  a  curious  thing  that  while  most  organised  re- 
ligions seem  to  drape  about  and  conceal  and  smother 
the  statement  of  the  true  God,  the  honest  Atheist, 
with  his  passionate  impulse  to  strip  the  truth  bare, 
is  constantly  and  unwittingly  reproducing  the  di- 
vine likeness.  It  will  be  interesting  here  to  call  a 
witness  or  so  to  the  extreme  instability  of  absolute 
negation. 

Here,  for  example,  is  a  deliverance  from  Pro- 
fessor Metchnikoff,  who  was  a  very  typical  antago- 
nist of  all  religion.  He  died  only  the  other  day. 
He  was  a  very  great  physiologist  indeed ;  he  was  a 
man  almost  of  the  rank  and  quality  of  Pasteur  or 
Charles  Darwin.  A  decade  or  more  ago  he  wrote 
a  book  called  "  The  Nature  of  Man,"  in  which  he 
set  out  very  plainly  a  number  of  illuminating  facts 
about  life.  They  are  facts  so  illuminating  that 
presently,  in  our  discussion  of  sin,  they  will  be  re- 
ferred to  again.     But  it  is  not  Professor  Metchiii- 

69 


70  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

koff's  intention  to  provide  material  for  a  religious 
discussion.  He  sets  out  his  facts  in  order  to  over- 
throw theology  as  he  conceives  it.  The  remarkable 
thing  about  his  book,  the  thing  upon  which  I  would 
now  lay  stress,  is  that  he  betrays  no  inkling  of  the 
fact  that  he  has  no  longer  the  right  to  conceive 
theology  as  he  conceives  it.  The  development  of 
his  science  has  destroyed  that  right. 

He  does  not  realise  how  profoundly  modern 
'^  biology  has  affected  our  ideas  of  individuality  and 
r^  species,  and  how  the  import  of  theology  is  modified 
-t  through  these  changes.  When  he  comes  from  his 
f  own  world  of  modern  biology  to  religion  and  philos- 
J:  ophy  he  goes  back  in  time.  He  attacks  religion 
iST  'Es  he  understood  it  when  first  he  fell  out  with  it 
fifty  years  or  more  ago. 

Let  us  state  as  compactly  as  possible  the  nature 
of  these  changes  that  biological  science  has  wrought 
almost  imperceptibly  in  the  general  scheme  and 
method  of  our  thinking. 

The  influence  of  biology  upon  thought  in  general 
consists  essentially  in  diminishing  the  importance 
of  the  individual  and  developing  the  realisation  of 
the  species,  as  if  it  were  a  kind  of  super-individual, 
a  modifying  and  immortal  super-individual,  main- 
taining itself  against  the  outer  universe  by  the  birth 


THE  RELIGION  OF  ATHEISTS  71 

and  death  of  its  constituent  individuals.  Natural 
History,  which  began  by  putting  individuals  into 
species  as  if  the  latter  were  mere  classificatory  di- 
visions, has  come  to  see  that  the  species  has  its  ad- 
ventures, its  history  and  drama,  far  exceeding  in 
interest  and  importance  the  individual  adventure. 
"  The  Origin  of  Species  "  was  for  countless  minds 
the  discovery  of  a  new  romance  in  life. 

The  contrast  of  the  individual  life  and  this  spe- 
cific life  may  be  stated  plainly  and  compactly  as 
follows.  A  little  while  ago  we  current  individuals, 
we  who  are  alive  now,  were  each  of  us  distributed 
between  two  parents,  then  between  four  grand- 
parents, and  so  on  backward,  we  are  temporarily 
assembled,  as  it  were,  out  of  an  ancestral  diffusion ; 
we  stand  our  trial,  and  presently  our  individuality 
is  dispersed  and  mixed  again  with  other  individu- 
alities in  an  uncertain  multitude  of  descendants. 
But  the  species  is  not  like  this ;  it  goes  on  steadily 
from  newness  to  newness,  remaining  still  a  unity. 
The  drama  of  the  individual  life  is  a  mere  episode, 
beneficial  or  abandoned,  in  this  continuing  adven- 
ture of  the  species.  And  Metchnikoff  finds  most 
of  the  trouble  of  life  and  the  distresses  of  life  in 
the  fact  that  the  species  is  still  very  painfully  ad- 
justing itself  to  the  fluctuating  conditions  under 


72  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

which  it  lives.  The  conflict  of  life  is  a  continual 
pursuit  of  adjustment,  and  the  "  ills  of  life,"  of  the 
individual  life  that  is,  are  due  to  its  "  disharmon- 
ies/' Man,  acutely  aware  of  himself  as  an  indi- 
vidual adventure  and  unawakened  to  himself  as  a 
species,  finds  life  jangling  and  distressful,  finds 
death  frustration.  He  fails  and  falls  as  a  person 
in  what  may  be  the  success  and  triumph  of  his 
kind.  He  does  not  apprehend  the  struggle  or  the 
nature  of  victory,  but  only  his  own  gravitation  to 
death  and  personal  extinction. 

Now  Professor  Metchnikoff  is  anti-religious,  and 
he  is  anti-religious  because  to  him  as  to  so 
many  Europeans  religion  is  confused  with  priest- 
craft and  dogmas,  is  associated  with  disagreeable 
early  impressions  of  irrational  repression  and  mis- 
guidance. How  completely  he  misconceives  the 
quality  of  religion,  how  completely  he  sees  it  as 
an  individual's  affair,  his  own  words  may  witness : 

"Religion  is  still  occupied  with  the  problem  of  death. 
The  solutions  which  as  yet  it  has  offered  cannot  be  re- 
garded as  satisfactory.  A  future  life  has  no  single  argu- 
ment to  support  it,  and  the  non-existence  of  life  after 
death  is  in  consonance  with  the  whole  range  of  human 
knowledge.  On  the  other  hand,  resignation  as  preached 
by  Buddha  will  fail  to  satisfy  humanity,  which  has  a 
longing  for  life,  and  is  overcome  by  the  thought  of  the 
inevitability  of  death." 


THE  RELIGION  OF  ATHEISTS  73 

Now  here  it  is  clear  that  by  death  he  means  the 
individual  death,  and  by  a  future  life  the  prolonga- 
tion of  individuality.  But  Buddhism  does  not  in 
truth  appear  ever  to  have  been  concerned  with  that, 
and  modern  religious  developments  are  certainly 
not  under  that  preoccupation  with  the  narrower 
self.  Buddhism  indeed  so  far  from  "  preaching 
resignation  "  to  death,  seeks  as  its  greater  good  a 
death  so  complete  as  to  be  absolute  release  from  the 
individual's  burthen  of  karma.  Buddhism  seeks 
an  escape  from  individual  immortality.  The  deeper 
one  pursues  religious  thought  the  more  nearly  it 
approximates  to  a  search  for  escape  from  the  self- 
centred  life  and  over-individuation,  and  the  more  it 
diverges  from  Professor  Metchnikoff 's  assertion  of 
its  aims.  Salvation  is  indeed  to  lose  one's  self. 
But  Professor  Metchnikoff  having  roundly  denied 
that  this  is  so,  is  then  left  free  to  take  the  very 
essentials  of  the  religious  life  as  they  are  here  con- 
ceived and  present  them  as  if  they  were  the  antithe- 
sis of  the  religious  life.  His  book,  when  it  is  ana- 
lysed, resolves  itself  into  just  that  research  for  an 
escape  from  the  painful  accidents  and  chagrins  of 
individuation,  which  is  the  ultimate  of  religion. 

At  times,  indeed,  he  seems  almost  wilfully  blind 
to  the  true  solution  round  and  about  which  his 


74  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

writing  goes.  He  suggests  as  his  most  hopeful  sat- 
isfaction for  the  cravings  of  the  human  heart,  such 
a  scientific  prolongation  of  life  that  the  instinct 
for  self-preservation  will  be  at  last  extinct.  If  that 
is  not  the  very  "  resignation  "  he  imputes  to  the 
Buddhist  I  do  not  know  what  it  is.  He  believes 
that  an  individual  which  has  lived  fully  and  com- 
pletely may  at  last  welcome  death  with  the  same 
instinctive  readiness  as,  in  the  days  of  its  strength, 
it  shows  for  the  embraces  of  its  mate.  We  are  to 
be  glutted  by  living  to  six  score  and  ten.  We  are 
to  rise  from  the  table  at  last  as  gladly  as  we  sat 
down.  We  shall  go  to  death  as  unresistingly  as 
tired  children  go  to  bed.  Men  are  to  have  a  life  far 
beyond  the  range  of  what  is  now  considered  their 
prime,  and  their  last  period  (won  by  scientific 
self-control)  will  be  a  period  of  ripe  wisdom  (from 
seventy  to  eighty  to  a  hundred  and  twenty  or 
thereabouts)  and  public  service  ! 

(But  why,  one  asks,  pul)lic  service  ?  Why  not 
book-collecting  or  the  simple  pleasure  of  reminis- 
cence so  dear  to  aged  egotists?  Metchnikoff  never 
faces  that  question.  And  again,  what  of  the  man 
who  is  challenged  to  die  for  right  at  the  age  of 
thirty  ?  What  does  the  prolongation  of  life  do  for 
him  ?     And  where  are  the  consolations  for  acci- 


THE  RELIGION  OF  ATHEISTS  75 

dental  misfortune,  for  the  tormenting  disease  or  the 
lost  limb?) 

But  in  his  peroration  Professor  Metchnikoff 
lapses  into  pure  religiosity.  The  prolongation  of 
life  gives  place  to  sheer  self-sacrifice  as  the  funda- 
mental "remedy."  And  indeed  what  other  rem- 
edy has  ever  been  conceived  for  the  general  evil  of 
life? 

"On  the  other  hand,"  he  writes,  "the  knowledge  that 
the  goal  of  human  life  can  be  attained  only  by  the  de- 
velopment of  a  high  degree  of  solidarity  amongst  men 
will  restrain  actual  egotism.  The  mere  fact  that  the 
enjoyment  of  life  according  to  the  precepts  of  Solomon 
(Ecclesiastes  ix.  7-10  )i  is  opposed  to  the  goal  of  human 
life,  will  lessen  luxury  and  the  evil  that  comes  from 
luxury.  Conviction  that  science  alone  is  able  to  redress 
the  disharmonies  of  the  human  constitution  will  lead 
directly  to  the  improvement  of  education  and  to  the 
solidarity  of  mankind. 

"In  progress  towards  the  goal,  nature  will  have  to 
be  consulted  continuously.  Already,  in  the  case  of  the 
ephemerids,  nature  has  produced  a  complete  cycle  of 

1  Go  thy  way,  eat  thy  bread  with  joy,  and  drink  thy  wine  with 
a  merry  heart;  for  God  now  accepteth  thy  works.  Let  thy 
garments  be  always  white ;  and  let  thy  head  lack  no  ointment. 
Live  joyfully  with  the  wife  whom  thou  lovest  all  the  days  of  the 
life  of  thy  vanity,  which  he  hath  given  thee  under  the  sun,  all 
the  days  of  thy  Vanity  for  that  is  thy  portion  in  this  life,  and 
in  thy  labour  \vhich  thou  takest  under  the  sun.  Whatsoever 
thy  hand  flndeth  to  do,  do  it  with  thy  might;  for  there  is  no 
work,  nor  device,  nor  knowledge,  nor  wisdom,  in  the  grave, 
whither  thou  goest. 


76  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

uormal  life  ending  in  natural  death.  In  the  problem 
of  his  own  fate,  man  must  not  be  content  with  the  gifts 
of  nature ;  he  must  direct  them  by  his  own  efforts.  Just 
as  he  has  been  able  to  modify  the  nature  of  animals  and 
plants,  man  must  attempt  to  modify  his  own  constitu- 
tion, so  as  to  readjust  its  disharmonies.  .  .  . 

''To  modify  the  human  constitution,  it  will  be  neces- 
sary first,  to  frame  the  ideal,  and  thereafter  to  set  to 
work  with  all  the  resources  of  science. 

"If  there  can  be  formed  an  ideal  able  to  unite  men 
in  a  kind  of  religion  of  the  future,  this  ideal  must  be 
founded  on  scientific  principles.  And  if  it  be  true,  as 
has  been  asserted  so  often,  that  man  can  live  by  faith 
alone,  the  faith  must  be  in  the  power  of  science." 

Now  this,  after  all  the  flat  repudiations  that 
have  preceded  it  of  "  religion  "  and  "  philosophy  " 
as  remedies  for  human  ills,  is  nothing  less  than  the 
fundamental  proposition  of  the  religious  life  trans- 
lated into  terms  of  materialistic  science,  the  propo- 
sition that  damnation  is  really  over-individuation 
and  that  salvation  is  escape  from  self  into  the  larger 
being  of  life.  .  .  . 

What  can  this  "  religion  of  the  future  "  be  but 
that  devotion  to  the  racial  adventure  under  the 
captaincy  of  God  which  we  have  already  found, 
like  gold  in  the  bottom  of  the  vessel,  when  we  have 
washed  away  the  confusions  and  impurities  of  dog- 
matic religion?     By  an  inquiry  setting  out  from  a 


THE  RELIGION  OF  ATHEISTS  77 

purely  religious  starting-point  we  have  already 
reached  conclusions  identical  with  this  ultimate 
refuge  of  an  extreme  materialist. 

This  altar  to  the  Future  of  his,  we  can  claim  as 
an  altar  to  our  God  —  an  altar  rather  indistinctly 
inscribed. 

§  2  Sacrifice  Implies  God 
Almost  all  Agnostic  and  Atheistical  writings  that 
show  any  fineness  and  generosity  of  spirit,  have 
this  tendency  to  become  as  it  were  the  statement 
of  an  anonymous  God.  Everything  is  said  that 
a  religious  writer  would  say  —  except  that  God 
is  not  named.  Eeligious  metaphors  abound.  It 
is  as  if  they  accepted  the  living  body  of  religion 
but  denied  the  bones  that  held  it  together  —  as  they 
might  deny  the  bones  of  a  friend.  It  is  true,  they 
would  admit,  the  body  moves  in  a  way  that  implies 
bones  in  its  every  movement,  but — we  have  never 
seen  those  hones. 

The  disputes  in  theory  —  I  do  not  say  the  dif- 
ference in  reality  —  between  the  modern  believer 
and  the  atheist  or  agnostic  —  becomes  at  times  al- 
most as  impalpable  as  that  subtle  discussion  dear 
to  students  of  physics,  whether  the  scientific 
"  ether  "  is  real  or  a  formula.     Every  material  phe- 


78  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

nomenon  is  consonant  with  and  helps  to  define  this 
ether,  which  permeates  and  sustains  and  is  all 
things,  which  nevertheless  is  perceptible  to  no 
sense,  wiiich  is  reached  only  by  an  intellectual  proc- 
ess. Most  minds  are  disposed  to  treat  this  ether 
as  a  reality.  But  the  acutely  critical  mind  insists 
that  what  is  only  so  attainable  by  inference  is  not 
real ;  it  is  no  more  than  "  a  formula  that  satisfies 
all  phenomena." 

But  if  it  comes  to  that,  am  I  anything  more  than 
the  formula  that  satisfies  all  my  forms  of  con- 
sciousness? 

Intellectually  there  is  hardly  anything  more 
than  a  certain  will  to  believe,  to  divide  the  religious 
man  who  knows  God  to  be  utterly  real,  from  the 
man  who  says  that  God  is  merely  a  formula  to 
satisfy  moral  and  spiritual  phenomena.  The  for- 
mer has  encountered  him,  the  other  has  as  yet  felt 
only  unassigned  impulses.  One  says  God's  will  is 
so ;  the  other  that  Right  is  so.  One  says  God  moves 
me  to  do  this  or  that;  the  other  the  Good  Will  in 
me  which  I  share  w^ith  you  and  all  well-disposed 
men,  moves  me  to  do  this  or  that.  But  the  former 
makes  an  exterior  reference  and  escapes  a  risk  of 
self-righteousness. 

I  have  recently  been  reading  a  book  b'y  Mr.  Jo- 


THE  RELIGION  OF  ATHEISTS  79 

seph  McCabe  called  "  The  Tyranny  of  Shams,"  in 
which  he  displays  very  typically  this  curious  ten- 
dency to  a  sort  of  religion  with  God  "  blacked  out." 
His  is  an  extremely  interesting  case.  He  is  a 
writer  who  was  formerly  a  Roman  Catholic  priest, 
and  in  his  reaction  from  Catholicism  he  displays  a 
resolution  even  sterner  than  Professor  Metchni- 
koff's,  to  deny  that  anything  religious  or  divine 
can  exist,  that  there  can  be  any  aim  in  life  except 
happiness,  or  any  guide  but  "  science."  But  — 
and  here  immediately  he  turns  east  again  —  he  is 
careful  not  to  say  "individual  happiness."  And 
he  says  "  Pleasure  is,  as  Epicureans  insisted,  only 
a  part  of  a  large  ideal  of  happiness."  So  he  lets 
the  happiness  of  devotion  and  sacrifice  creep  in. 
So  he  opens  indefinite  possibilities  of  getting  away 
from  any  merely  materialistic  rule  of  life.  And  he 
writes : 

"In  every  civilised  nation  the  mass  of  the  people  are 
inert  and  indifferent.  Some  even  make  a  pretence  of 
justifying  their  inertness.  Why,  they  ask,  should  we 
stir  at  all  ?  Is  there  such  a  thing  as  a  duty  to  improve 
the  earth?  What  is  the  meaning  or  purpose  of  life? 
Or  has  it  a  purpose? 

"One  generally  finds  that  this  kind  of  reasoning  is 
merely  a  piece  of  controversial  athletics  or  a  thin  excuse 
for  idleness.    People  tell  you  that  the  conflict  of  science 


80  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

and  religion  —  it  would  be  better  to  say,  the  conflict  of 
modern  culture  and  ancient  traditions  —  has  robbed 
life  of  its  plain  significance.  The  men  who,  like  Tolstoi, 
seriously  urge  this  point  fail  to  appreciate  the  modern 
outlook  on  life.  Certainly  modern  culture  —  science, 
history,  philosophy,  and  art  —  finds  no  purpose  in  life: 
that  is  to  say,  no  purpose  eternally  fixed  and  to  be  dis- 
covered by  man.  A  great  chemist  said  a  few  years  ago 
that  he  could  imagine  '  a  series  of  lucky  accidents ' —  the 
chance  blowing  by  the  wind  of  certain  chemicals  into 
pools  on  the  primitive  earth  —  accounting  for  the  first 
appearance  of  life;  and  one  might  not  unjustly  sum  up 
the  influences  which  have  lifted  those  early  germs  to  the 
level  of  conscious  beings  as  a  similar  series  of  lucky 
accidents. 

"But  it  is  sheer  affectation  to  say  that  this  demoralises 
us.  If  there  is  no  purpose  impressed  on  the  universe, 
or  prefixed  to  the  development  of  humanity,  it  follows 
only  that  humanity  may  choose  its  own  purpose  and  set 
up  its  own  goal ;  and  the  most  elementary  sense  of  order 
will  teach  us  that  this  choice  must  be  social,  not  merely 
individual.  In  whatever  measure  ill-controlled  individ- 
uals may  yield  to  personal  impulses  or  attractions,  the 
aim  of  the  race  must  be  a  collective  aim.  I  do  not  mean 
an  austere  demand  of  self-sacrifice  from  the  individual, 
but  an  adjustment  —  as  genial  and  generous  as  possible 
—  of  individual  variations  for  common  good.  Other- 
wise life  becomes  discordant  and  futile,  and  the  pain  and 
waste  react  on  each  individual.  So  we  raise  again,  in 
the  twentieth  century,  the  old  question  of  'the  greatest 
good,'  which  men  discussed  in  the  Stoa  Poikile  and  the 
suburban  groves  of  Athens,  in  the  cool  atria  of  patrician 


THE  RELIGION  OF  ATHEISTS         81 

mansions  on  the  Palatine  and  the  Pineian,  in  the  Museum 
at  Alexandria,  and  the  schools  which  Omar  Khayyam 
frequented,  in  the  straw-strewn  schools  of  the  Middle 
Ages  and  the  opulent  chambers  of  Cosimo  dei  Medici." 

And  again : 

"The  old  dream  of  a  co-operative  effort  to  improve 
life,  to  bring  happiness  to  as  many  minds  of  mortals  as 
we  can  reach,  shines  above  all  the  mists  of  the  day. 
Through  the  ruins  of  creeds  and  philosophies,  which 
have  for  ages  disdained  it,  we  are  retracing  our  steps 
toward  that  height  —  just  as  the  Athenians  did  two  thou- 
sand years  ago.  It  rests  on  no  metaphysic,  no  sacred 
legend,  no  disputable  tradition  —  nothing  that  scepti- 
cism can  corrode  or  advancing  knowledge  undermine. 
Its  foundations  are  the  fundamental  and  unchanging 
impulses  of  our  nature." 

And  again : 

"The  revolt  which  burns  in  so  much  of  the  abler 
literature  of  our  time  is  an  unselfish  revolt,  or  non- 
selfish  revolt :  it  is  an  outcome  of  that  larger  spirit  which 
conceives  the  self  to  be  a  part  of  the  general  social  or- 
ganism, and  it  is  therefore  neither  egoistic  nor  altruistic. 
It  finds  a  sanction  in  the  new  intelligence,  and  an  inspira- 
tion in  the  finer  sentiments  of  our  generation,  but  the 
glow  which  chiefly  illumines  it  is  the  glow  of  the  great 
vision  of  a  happier  earth.  It  speaks  of  the  claims  of 
truth  and  justice,  and  assails  untruth  and  injustice,  for 
these  are  elemental  principles  of  social  life;  but  it  ap- 
peals more  confidently  to  the  warmer  sympathy  which  is 
linking  the  scattered  children  of  the  race,  and  it  urges 


82  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

all  to  co-operate  in  the  restriction  of  suffering  and  the 
creation  of  happiness.  The  advance  guard  of  the  race, 
the  men  and  women  in  whom  mental  alertness  is  asso- 
ciated with  fine  feeling,  cry  that  they  have  reached 
Pisgah's  slope;  and  in  increasing  numbers  men  and 
women  are  pressing  on  to  see  if  it  be  really  the  Promised 
Land." 

"  Pisffah  —  the  Promised  Land !  "  Mr.  McCabe 
in  that  passage  sounds  as  if  he  were  half-way  to 
"  Oh !  Beulah  Land !  "  and  the  tambourine. 

That  "  larger  spirit,"  we  maintain,  is  God;  those 
"impulses"  are  the  power  of  God,  and  Mr.  Mc- 
Cabe serves  a  Master  he  denies.  He  has  but  to  re- 
alise fully  that  God  is  not  necessarily  the  Triune 
God  of  the  Catholic  Church,  and  banish  his  intense 
suspicion  that  he  may  yet  be  lured  back  to  that 
altar  he  abandoned,  he  has  but  to  look  up  from  that 
preoccupation,  and  immediately  he  will  begin  to 
realise  the  presence  of  Divinity. 

§  3  God  is  an  External  Reality 
It  may  be  argued  that  if  atheists  and  agnostics 
when  they  set  themselves  to  express  the  good  will 
that  is  in  them,  do  shape  out  God,  that  if  their 
conception  of  right  living  falls  in  so  completely 
with  the  conception  of  God's  service  as  to  be 
broadly  identical,  then  indeed  God,  like  the  ether  of 


THE  RELIGION  OF  ATHEISTS  83 

scientific  speculation,  is  no  more  than  a  theory,  no 
more  than  an  imaginative  externalisation  of  man's 
inherent  good  will.  Why  trouble  about  God  then? 
Is  not  the  declaration  of  a  good  disposition  a  suf- 
ficient evidence  of  salvation?  What  is  the  differ- 
ence between  such  benevolent  unbelievers  as  Pro- 
fessor Metchnikoff  or  Mr.  McCabe  and  those  who 
have  found  God? 

The  difference  is  this,  that  the  benevolent  atheist 
stands  alone  upon  his  own  good  will,  without  a 
reference,  without  a  standard,  trusting  to  his  own 
impulse  to  goodness,  relying  upon  his  own  moral 
strength,  A  certain  immodesty,  a  certain  self- 
righteousness,  hangs  like  a  precipice  above  him; 
incalculable  temptations  open  like  gulfs  beneath 
his  feet.  He  has  not  really  given  himself  or  got 
away  from  himself.  He  has  no  one  to  whom  he 
can  give  himself.  He  is  still  a  masterless  man. 
His  exaltation  is  self-centred,  is  priggishness,  his 
fall  is  unrestrained  by  any  exterior  obligation. 
His  devotion  is  only  the  good  will  in  himself,  a  dis- 
position; it  is  a  mood  that  may  change.  At  any 
moment  it  may  change.  He  may  have  pledged  him- 
self to  his  own  pride  and  honour,  but  who  will  hold 
him  to  his  bargain?  He  has  no  source  of  strength 
beyond  his  own  amiable  sentiments,  his  conscience 


84  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

speaks  with  an  unsupported  voice,  and  no  one 
watches  while  he  sleeps.  He  cannot  pray;  he  can 
but  ejaculate.  He  has  no  real  and  living  link  with 
other  men  of  good  will. 

And  those  whose  acquiescence  in  the  idea  of  God 
is  merely  intellectual  are  in  no  better  case  than 
those  who  deny  God  altogether.  They  may  have  all 
the  forms  of  truth  and  not  divinity.  The  religion 
of  the  atheist  with  a  God-shaped  blank  at  its  heart 
and  the  persuasion  of  the  unconverted  theologian, 
are  both  like  lamps  unlit.  The  lit  lamp  has  no 
difference  in  form  from  the  lamp  unlit.  But  the 
lit  lamp  is  alive  and  the  lamp  unlit  is  asleep  or 
dead. 

The  difference  between  the  unconverted  and  the 
unbeliever  and  the  servant  of  the  true  God  is  this ; 
it  is  that  the  latter  has  experienced  a  complete  turn- 
ing away  from  self.  This  only  difference  is  all  the 
difference  in  the  world.  It  is  the  realisation  that 
this  goodness  that  I  thought  was  within  me  and  of 
myself  and  upon  which  I  rather  prided  myself,  is 
without  me  and  above  myself,  and  infinitely  greater 
and  stronger  than  I.  It  is  the  immortal  and  I  am 
mortal.  It  is  invincible  and  steadfast  in  its  pur- 
pose, and  I  am  weak  and  insecure.  It  is  no  longer 
that  I,  out  of  my  inherent  and  remarkable  goodness, 


THE  RELIGION  OF  ATHEISTS  85 

out  of  the  excellence  of  my  quality  and  the  benevo- 
lence of  my  heart,  give  a  considerable  amount  of 
time  and  attention  to  the  happiness  and  welfare 
of  others  —  because  I  choose  to  do  so.  On  the 
contrary  I  have  come  under  a  divine  imperative, 
I  am  obeying  an  irresistible  call,  I  am  a  humble 
and  willing  servant  of  the  righteousness  of  God. 
That  altruism  which  Professor  Metchnikoff  and 
Mr.  McCabe  would  have  us  regard  as  the  goal  and 
refuge  of  a  broad  and  free  intelligence,  is  really  the 
first  simple  commandment  in  the  religious  life. 

§  4  Another  Eeligious  Materialist 
Nov7  here  is  a  passage  from  a  book,  "  Evolution  and 
the  War,"  by  Professor  Metchnikoff's  translator, 
Dr.  Chalmers  Mitchell,  which  comes  even  closer 
to  our  conception  of  God  as  an  immortal  being  aris- 
ing out  of  man,  and  external  to  the  individual  man. 
He  has  been  discussing  that  well-known  passage 
of  Kant's :  "  Two  things  fill  my  mind  with  ever- 
renewed  wonder  and  awe  the  more  often  and  deeper 
I  dwell  on  them  —  the  starry  vault  above  me,  and 
the  moral  law  within  me." 

From  that  discussion,  Dr.  Chalmers  Mitchell 
presently  comes  to  this  most  definite  and  interest- 
ing statement: 


86  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

"Writing  as  a  hard-shell  Darwinian  evolutionist,  a 
lover  of  the  scalpel  and  microscope,  and  of  patient, 
empirical  observation,  as  one  who  dislikes  all  forms  of 
supematuralism,  and  who  does  not  shrink  from  the  im- 
plications even  of  the  phrase  that  thought  is  a  secretion 
of  the  brain  as  bile  is  a  secretion  of  the  liver,  I  assert  as 
a  biological  fact  that  the  moral  law  is  as  real  and  as  ex- 
ternal to  man  as  the  starry  vault.  It  has  no  secure  seat 
in  any  single  man  or  in  any  single  nation.  It  is  the 
work  of  the  blood  and  tears  of  long  generations  of  men. 
It  is  not  in  man,  inborn  or  innate,  but  is  enshrined  in 
his  traditions,  in  his  customs,  in  his  literature  and  his 
religion.  Its  creation  and  sustenance  are  the  crowning 
glory  of  man,  and  his  consciousness  of  it  puts  him  in  a 
high  place  above  the  animal  world.  Men  live  and  die; 
nations  rise  and  fall,  but  the  struggle  of  individual  lives 
and  of  individual  nations  must  be  measured  not  by  their 
immediate  needs,  but  as  they  tend  to  the  debasement  or 
perfection  of  man's  great  achievement." 

This  is  the  same  reality.  This  is  the  same  Link 
and  Captain  that  this  book  asserts.  It  seems  to 
me  a  secondary  matter  whether  we  call  Him 
"  Man's  Great  Achievement  "  or  "  The  Son  of  Man  " 
or  the  "  God  of  Mankind  "  or  "  God."  So  far  as 
the  practical  and  moral  ends  of  life  are  concerned, 
it  does  not  matter  how  we  explain  or  refuse  to  ex- 
plain His  presence  in  our  lives. 

There  is  but  one  possible  gap  left  between  the  po- 
sition of  Dr.  Chalmers  Mitchell  and  the  position 


THE  RELIGION  OF  ATHEISTS  87 

of  this  book.  In  this  book  it  is  asserted  that  God 
responds,  that  he  gives  courage  and  the  power  of 
self -suppression  to  our  weakness. 

§  5  A  Note  on  a  Lecture  by  Professor 
Gilbert  Murray 
Let  me  now  quote  and  discuss  a  very  beautiful 
passage  from  a  lecture  upon  Stoicism  by  Professor 
Gilbert  Murray,  which  also  displays  the  same  char- 
acteristic of  an  involuntary  shaping  out  of  God  in 
the  forms  of  denial.  It  is  a  passage  remarkable 
for  its  conscientious  and  resolute  Agnosticism. 
And  it  is  remarkable  too  for  its  blindness  to  the 
possibility  of  separating  quite  completely  the  idea 
of  the  Infinite  Being  from  the  idea  of  God.  It  is 
another  striking  instance  of  that  obsession  of  mod- 
ern minds  by  merely  Christian  theology  of  which 
I  have  already  complained.  Professor  Murray  has 
quoted  Mr.  Bevan's  phrase  for  God,  "  the  Friend 
behind  phenomena,"  and  he  does  not  seem  to  rea- 
lise that  that  phrase  carries  with  it  no  obligation 
whatever  to  believe  that  this  Friend  is  in  control 
of  the  phenomena.  He  assumes  that  he  is  sup- 
posed to  be  in  control  as  if  it  were  a  matter  of 
course : 


88  GOD  THE  I:NVISIBLE  KING 

''"We  do  seem  to  find,"  Professor  Murray  writes,  "not 
only  in  all  religions,  but  in  practically  all  philosophies, 
some  belief  that  man  is  not  quite  alone  in  the  universe, 
but  is  met  in  his  endeavours  towards  the  good  by  some 
external  help  or  sympathy.  We  find  it  everywhere  in 
the  unsophisticated  man.  We  find  it  in  the  unguarded 
self-revelations  of  the  most  severe  and  conscientious 
Atheists.  Now,  the  Stoics,  like  many  other  schools  of 
thought,  drew  an  argument  from  this  consensus  of  all 
mankind.  It  was  not  an  absolute  proof  of  the  existence 
of  the  Gods  or  Providence,  but  it  was  a  strong  indica- 
tion. The  existence  of  a  common  instinctive  belief  in 
the  mind  of  man  gives  at  least  a  presumption  that  there 
must  be  a  good  cause  for  that  belief. 

''This  is  a  reasonable  position.  There  must  be  some 
such  cause.  But  it  does  not  follow  that  the  only  valid 
cause  is  the  truth  of  the  content  of  the  belief.  I  cannot 
help  suspecting  that  this  is  precisely  one  of  those  points 
on  which  Stoicism,  in  company  with  almost  all  philoso- 
phy up  to  the  present  time,  has  gone  astray  through  not 
sufficiently  realising  its  dependence  on  the  human  mind 
as  a  natural  biological  product.  For  it  is  very  impor- 
tant in  this  matter  to  realise  that  the  so-called  belief  is 
not  really  an  intellectual  judgment  so  much  as  a  craving 
of  the  whole  nature. 

"It  is  only  of  very  late  years  that  psychologists  have 
begun  to  realise  the  enormous  dominion  of  those  forces 
in  man  of  which  he  is  normally  unconscious.  We  can- 
not escape  as  easily  as  these  brave  men  dreamed  from 
the  grip  of  the  blind  powers  beneath  the  threshold.  In- 
deed, as  I  see  philosophy  after  philosophy  falling  into 
this  unproven  belief  in  the  Friend  behind  phenomena. 


THE  RELIGION  OF  ATHEISTS  89 

as  I  find  that  I  myself  cannot,  except  for  a  moment  and 
by  an  effort,  refrain  from  making  the  same  assumption, 
it  seems  to  me  that  perhaps  here  too  we  are  under  the 
spell  of  a  very  old  ineradicable  instinct.  We  are  gre- 
garious animals ;  our  ancestors  have  been  such  for  count- 
less ages.  We  cannot  help  looking  out  on  the  world  as 
gregarious  animals  do;  we  see  it  in  terms  of  humanity 
and  of  fellowship.  Students  of  animals  under  domesti- 
cation have  shown  us  how  the  habits  of  a  gregarious 
creature,  taken  away  from  his  kind,  are  shaped  in  a  thou- 
sand details  by  reference  to  the  lost  pack  which  is  no 
longer  there  —  the  pack  which  a  dog  tries  to  smell  his 
way  back  to  all  the  time  he  is  out  walking,  the  pack  he 
calls  to  for  help  when  danger  threatens.  It  is  a  strange 
and  touching  thing,  this  eternal  hunger  of  the  gregarious 
animal  for  the  herd  of  friends  who  are  not  there.  And 
it  may  be,  it  may  very  possibly  be,  that,  in  the  matter 
of  this  Friend  behind  phenomena  our  own  yearning  and 
our  own  almost  ineradicable  instinctive  conviction,  since 
they  are  certainly  not  founded  on  either  reason  or  ob- 
servation, are  in  origin  the  groping  of  a  lonely-souled 
gregarious  animal  to  find  its  herd  or  its  herd-leader  in 
the  great  spaces  between  the  stars. 

**At  any  rate,  it  is  a  belief  very  difficult  to  get  rid  of." 

There  the  passage  and  the  lecture  end. 

I  would  urge  that  here  again  is  an  inadvertent 
witness  to  the  reality  of  God. 

Professor  Murray  writes  of  gregarious  animals 
as  though  there  existed  solitary  animals  that  are  not 
gregarious,  pure  individualists,  "  atheists "  so  to 


90  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

speak,  and  as  though  this  appeal  to  a  life  beyond 
one's  own  was  not  the  universal  disposition  of  liv- 
ing things.  His  classical  training  disposes  him  to 
a  realistic  exaggeration  of  individual  difference. 
But  nearly  every  animal,  and  certainly  every  men- 
tally considerable  animal,  begins  under  parental 
care,  in  a  nest  or  a  litter,  mates  to  breed,  and  is 
associated  for  much  of  its  life.  Even  the  great 
carnivores  do  not  go  alone  except  when  they  are 
old  and  have  done  with  the  most  of  life.  Every 
pack,  every  herd,  begins  at  some  point  in  a  couple, 
it  is  the  equivalent  of  the  tiger's  litter  if  that  were 
to  remain  undispersed.  And  it  is  within  the  mem- 
ory of  men  still  living  that  in  many  districts  the 
African  lion  has  with  a  change  of  game  and  con- 
ditions lapsed  from  a  "  solitary  "  to  a  gregarious, 
that  is  to  say  a  prolonged  family  habit  of  life. 

Man  too,  if  in  his  ape-like  phase  he  resembled 
the  other  higher  apes,  is  an  animal  becoming  more 
gregarious  and  not  less.  He  has  passed  within  the 
historical  period  from  a  tribal  gregariousness  to 
a  nearly  cosmopolitan  tolerance.  And  he  has  his 
tribe  about  him.  He  is  not,  as  Professor  Murray 
seems  to  suggest,  a  solitary  lost  gregarious  beast. 
Why  should  his  desire  for  God  be  regarded  as  the 
overflow  of  an  unsatisfied  gregarious  instinct,  when 


THE  RELIGION  OF  ATHEISTS  91 

he  has  home,  town,  society,  companionship,  trade 
union,  state,  mcreasmgly  at  hand  to  glut  it?  Why 
should  gregariousness  drive  a  man  to  God  rather 
than  to  the  third-class  carriage  and  the  x^ublic- 
house?  Why  should  gregariousness  drive  men  out 
of  crowded  Egyptian  cities  into  the  cells  of  the 
Thebaid?  Schopenhauer  in  a  memorable  passage 
(about  the  hedgehogs  who  assembled  for  warmth) 
is  flatly  opposed  to  Professor  Murray,  and  seems 
far  more  plausible  when  he  declares  that  the  na- 
ture of  man  is  insufficiently  gregarious.  The  par- 
allel with  the  dog  is  not  a  valid  one. 

Does  not  the  truth  lie  rather  in  the  supposition 
that  it  is  not  the  Friend  that  is  the  instinctive  de- 
lusion but  the  isolation?  Is  not  the  real  deception, 
our  belief  that  we  are  completely  individualised, 
and  is  it  not  possible  that  this  that  Professor  Mur- 
ray calls  "  instinct "  is  really  not  a  vestige  but  a 
new  thing  arising  out  of  our  increasing  understand- 
ing, an  intellectual  penetration  to  that  greater  be- 
ing of  the  species,  that  vine,  of  which  we  are  the 
branches?  Why  should  not  the  soul  of  the  spe- 
cies, many  faceted  indeed,  be  nevertheless  a  soul 
like  our  own? 

Here,  as  in  the  case  of  Professor  Metchnikoff, 
and  in  many  other  cases  of  atheism,  it  seems  to  me 


92  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

that  nothing  but  an  inadequate  understanding  of 
individuation  bars  the  way  to  at  least  the  intellec- 
tual recognition  of  the  true  God. 

§  6  Religion  as  Ethics 
And  while  I  am  dealing  with  rationalists,  let  me 
note  certain  recent  interesting  utterances  of  Sir 
Harry  Johnston's.  You  will  note  that  while  in 
this  book  we  use  the  word  "  God  "  to  indicate  the 
God  of  the  Heart,  Sir  Harry  uses  "  God  "  for  that 
idea  of  God-of-the-Universe,  which  we  have  spoken 
of  as  the  Infinite  Being.  This  use  of  the  word 
"  God  "  is  of  late  theological  origin ;  the  original 
identity  of  the  words  "  good  "  and  "  god  "  and  all 
the  stories  of  the  gods  are  against  him.  But  Sir 
Harry  takes  up  God  only  to  define  him  away  into 
incomprehensible  necessity.     Thus : 

"We  know  absolutely  nothing  concerning  the  Force 
we  call  God;  and,  assuming  such  an  intelligent  ruling 
force  to  be  in  existence,  permeating  this  universe  of 
millions  of  stars  and  (no  doubt)  tens  of  millions  of 
planets,  we  do  not  know  under  what  conditions  and  limi- 
tations It  works.  We  are  quite  entitled  to  assume  that 
the  end  of  such  an  influence  is  intended  to  be  order  out 
of  chaos,  happiness  and  perfection  out  of  incomplete- 
ness and  misery;  and  we  are  entitled  to  identify  the 
reactionary  forces  of  brute  Nature  with  the  anthropo- 
morphic Devil  of  primitive  religions,  the  power  of  dark- 


THE  RELIGION  OF  ATHEISTS  93 

ness  resisting  the  power  of  light.  But  in  these  con- 
jectures we  must  surely  come  to  the  conclusion  that  the 
theoretical  potency  we  call  'God'  makes  endless  experi- 
ments, and  scrap-heaps  the  failures.  Think  of  the 
Dinosaurs  and  the  expenditure  of  creative  energy  that 
went  to  their  differentiation  and  their  wellnigh  incredi- 
ble physical  development.  .  .  . 

"To  such  a  Divine  Force  as  we  postulate,  the  whole 
development  and  perfecting  of  life  on  this  planet,  the 
whole  production  of  man,  may  seem  little  more  than  to 
any  one  of  us  would  be  the  chipping  out,  the  cutting, 
the  carving,  and  the  polishing  of  a  gem ;  and  we  should 
feel  as  little  remorse  or  pity  for  the  scattered  dust  and 
fragments  as  must  the  Creative  Force  of  the  immeasur- 
ably vast  universe  feel  for  the  disjecta  membra  of  per- 
fected life  on  this  planet.  ..." 

But  thence  he  goes  on  to  a  curiously  imperfect 
treatment  of  the  God  of  man  as  if  he  consisted  in 
nothing  more  than  some  vague  sort  of  humanitari- 
anism.  Sir  Harry's  ideas  are  much  less  thor- 
oughly thought  out  than  those  of  any  other  of  these 
sceptical  writers  I  have  quoted.  On  that  ac- 
count they  are  perhaps  more  typical.  He  speaks 
as  though  Christ  w^ere  simply  an  eminent  but  ill- 
reported  and  abominably  served  teacher  of  ethics 
—  and  yet  of  the  only  right  ideal  and  ethics.  He 
speaks  as  though  religions  were  nothing  more  than 
ethical   movements,    and    as   though    Christianity 


94  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

were  merely  someone  remarking  with  a  bright  im- 
pulsiveness that  everything  was  simply  horrid, 
and  so,  "  Let  us  instal  loving  kindness  as  a  cardinal 
axiom."  He  ignores  altogether  the  fundamental 
essential  of  religion,  which  is  the  development  and 
synthesis  of  the  divergent  and  conflicting  motives 
of  the  unconverted  life,  and  the  identification  of  the 
individual  life  with  the  immortal  purpose  of  Ood. 
He  presents  a  conception  of  religion  relieved  of  its 
"  nonsense  "  as  the  cheerful  self-determination  of 
a  number  of  bright  little  individuals  (much  stirred 
but  by  no  means  overcome  by  Cosmic  Pity)  to  the 
Service  of  Man.  As  he  seems  to  present  it,  it  is  as 
outward  a  thing,  it  goes  as  little  into  the  intimacy 
of  their  lives,  as  though  they  had  after  proper 
consideration  agreed  to  send  a  subscription  to  a 
Eed  Cross  Ambulance  or  take  part  in  a  public 
demonstration  against  the  Armenian  Massacres,  or 
do  any  other  rather  nice-spirited  exterior  thing. 
This  is  what  he  says  : 

"I  hope  that  the  religion  of  the  future  will  devote 
itself  wholly  to  the  Service  of  Man.  It  can  do  so  with- 
out departing  from  the  Christian  ideal  and  Christian 
ethics.  It  need  only  drop  all  that  is  silly  and  disputable, 
and  'mattering  not  neither  here  nor  there,'  of  Christian 
theology  —  a  theology  virtually  absent  from  the  direct 
teaching  of  Christ  —  and  all  of  Judaistic  literature  or 


THE  RELIGION  OF  ATHEISTS  95 

prescriptions  not  made  immortal  in  their  application  by- 
unassailable  truth  and  by  the  confirmation  of  science. 
An  excellent  remedy  for  the  nonsense  which  still  clings 
about  religion  may  be  found  in  two  books :  Cotter  Mori- 
son 's  'Service  of  Man,'  which  was  published  as  long  ago 
as  1887,  and  has  since  been  re-issued  by  the  Rationalist 
Press  Association  in  its  well-known  sixpenny  series,  and 
J.  Allanson  Picton's  'Man  and  the  Bible.'  Similarly, 
those  who  wish  to  acquire  a  sane  view  of  the  relations 
between  man  and  God  would  do  well  to  read  Winwood 
Reade's  'Martyrdom  of  Man.'  " 

Sir  Harry  in  fact  clears  the  ground  for  God  very 
ably,  and  then  makes  a  well-meaning  gesture  in 
the  vacant  space.  There  is  no  help  nor  strength 
in  his  gesture  unless  God  is  there.  Without  God, 
the  "  Service  of  Man  "  is  no  better  than  a  hobby 
or  a  sentimentality  or  an  hypocrisy  in  the  undis- 
ciplined prison  of  the  mortal  life. 


CHAPTER  THE  FIFTH 
THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

§  1  Modern  ReliCxIon  a  Political  Religion 
The  conception  of  a  young  and  energetic  God,  an 
Invisible  Prince  growing  in  strength  and  wisdom, 
who  calls  men  and  women  to  his  service  and  who 
gives  salvation  from  self  and  mortality  only 
through  self-abandonment  to  his  service,  necessa- 
rily involves  a  demand  for  a  complete  revision  and 
fresh  orientation  of  the  life  of  the  convert. 

God  faces  the  blackness  of  the  Unknown  and  the 
blind  joys  and  confusions  and  cruelties  of  Life,  as 
one  who  leads  mankind  through  a  dark  jungle  to 
a  great  conquest.  He  brings  mankind  not  rest  but 
a  sword.  It  is  plain  that  he  can  admit  no  divided 
control  of  the  world  he  claims.  He  concedes  noth- 
ing to  Caesar.  In  our  philosophy  there  are  no  hu- 
man things  that  are  God's  and  others  that  are 
Caesar's.  Those  of  the  new  thought  cannot  render 
unto  God  the  things  that  are  God's,  and  to  Caesar 
the  things  that  are  Caesar's.  Whatever  claim 
Caesar  may  make  to  rule  men's  lives  and  direct 

96 


THE  INVISIBLE  KING  97 

their  destinies  outside  the  will  of  God,  is  a  usurpa- 
tion. No  king  nor  Csesar  has  any  right  to  tax  or 
to  service  or  to  tolerance,  except  he  claim  as  one 
who  holds  for  and  under  God.  And  he  must  make 
good  his  claim.  The  steps  of  the  altar  of  the  God 
of  Youth  are  no  safe  place  for  the  sacrilegious  fig- 
ure of  a  king.  Who  claims  "  divine  right ''  plays 
with  the  lightning. 

The  new  conceptions  do  not  tolerate  either  kings 
or  aristocracies  or  democracies.  Its  implicit  com- 
mand to  all  its  adherents  is  to  make  plain  the  way 
to  the  world  theocracy.  Its  rule  of  life  is  the  dis- 
covery and  service  of  the  will  of  God,  which  dwells 
in  the  hearts  of  men,  and  the  performance  of  that 
will,  not  only  in  the  private  life  of  the  believer  but 
in  the  acts  and  order  of  the  state  and  nation  of 
which  he  is  a  part.  I  give  myself  to  God  not  only 
because  I  am  so  and  so  but  because  I  am  mankind. 
I  become  in  a  measure  responsible  for  every  evil 
in  the  world  of  men.  I  become  a  knight  in  God's 
service.  I  become  my  brother's  keeper.  I  become 
a  responsible  minister  of  my  King.  I  take  sides 
against  injustice,  disorder,  and  against  all  those 
temporal  kings,  emperors,  princes,  landlords,  and 
owners,  who  set  themselves  up  against  God's  rule 
and  worship.     Kings,  owners,  and  all  who  claim 


98  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

rule  and  decisions  in  the  world's  affairs,  must  either 
show  themselves  clearly  the  fellow-servants  of  the 
believer  or  become  the  objects  of  his  steadfast  an- 
tagonism. 

§  2  The  Will  of  God 
It  is  here  that  those  who  explain  this  modern  re- 
ligiosity will  seem  most  arbitrary  to  the  inquirer. 
For  they  relate  of  God,  as  men  will  relate  of  a 
close  friend,  his  dispositions,  his  apparent  inten- 
tions, the  aims  of  his  kingship.  And  just  as  they 
advance  no  proof  whatever  of  the  existence  of  God 
but  their  realisation  of  him,  so  with  regard  to  these 
qualities  and  dispositions  they  have  little  argument 
but  profound  conviction.  What  they  say  is  this; 
that  if  you  do  not  feel  God  then  there  is  no  per- 
suading you  of  him ;  we  cannot  win  over  the  in- 
credulous. And  what  they  say  of  his  qualities  is 
this;  that  if  you  feel  God  then  you  will  know,  you 
will  realise  more  and  more  clearly,  that  thus  and 
thus  and  no  other  is  his  method  and  intention. 

It  comes  as  no  great  shock  to  those  who  have 
grasped  the  full  implications  of  the  statement  that 
God  is  Finite,  to  hear  it  asserted  that  the  first  pur- 
pose of  God  is  the  attainment  of  clear  knowledge,  of 
knowledge  as  a  means  to  more  knowledge,  and  of 


THE  INVISIBLE  KING  99 

knowledge  as  a  means  to  power.  For  that  he  must 
use  human  eyes  and  hands  and  brains. 

And  as  God  gathers  power  he  uses  it  to  an  end 
that  he  is  only  beginning  to  apprehend,  and  that 
he  will  apprehend  more  fully  as  time  goes  on.  But 
it  is  possible  to  define  the  broad  outlines  of  the 
attainment  he  seeks.     It  is  the  conquest  of  death. 

It  is  the  conquest  of  death ;  first  the  overcoming 
of  death  in  the  individual  by  the  incorporation  of 
the  motives  of  his  life  into  an  undying  purpose, 
and  then  the  defeat  of  that  death  that  seems  to 
threaten  our  species  upon  a  cooling  planet  beneath 
a  cooling  sun.  God  fights  against  death  in  every 
form,  against  the  great  death  of  the  race,  against 
the  petty  death  of  indolence,  insufficiency,  baseness, 
misconception,  and  perversion.  He  it  is  and  no 
other  who  can  deliver  us  "  from  the  body  of  this 
death."  This  is  the  battle  that  grows  plainer;  this 
is  the  purpose  to  which  he  calls  us  out  of  the  ani- 
mal's round  of  eating,  drinking,  lusting,  quarrelling 
and  laughing  and  weeping,  fearing  and  failing,  and 
presently  of  wearying  and  dying,  which  is  the  whole 
life  that  living  without  God  can  give  us.  And  from 
these  great  propositions  there  follow  many  very 
definite  maxims  and  rules  of  life  for  those  who 
serve  God.     These  we  will  immediately  consider. 


100  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

§  3  The  Crucifix 
But  first  let  me  write  a  few  words  here  about 
those  who  hold  a  kind  of  intermediate  faith  be- 
tween the  worship  of  the  God  of  Youth  and  the 
vaguer  sort  of  Christianity.  There  are  a  number 
of  people  closely  in  touch  with  those  who  have 
found  the  new  religion  who,  biased  probably  by  a 
dread  of  too  complete  a  break  with  Christianity, 
have  adopted  a  theogony  which  is  very  reminiscent 
of  Gnosticism  and  of  the  Paulician,  Catharist,  and 
kindred  sects  to  which  allusion  has  already  been 
made.  He,  who  is  called  in  this  book  God,  they 
would  call  God-the-Son  or  Christ,  or  the  Logos; 
and  what  is  here  called  the  Darkness  or  the  Veiled 
Being,  they  would  call  God-the-Father.  And  what 
we  speak  of  here  as  Life,  they  would  call,  with  a 
certain  disregard  of  the  poor  brutes  that  perish, 
Man.  And  they  would  assert,  what  we  of  the  new 
belief,  pleading  our  profound  ignorance,  would 
neither  assert  nor  deny,  that  that  Darkness,  out  of 
which  came  Life  and  God,  since  it  produced  them 
must  be  ultimately  sympathetic  and  of  like  nature 
with  them.  And  that  ultimately  Man,  being  re- 
deemed and  led  by  Christ  and  saved  from  death  by 
him,  would  be  reconciled  with  God  the  Father.^ 

iThis  probably  was  the  conception  of  Spinoza.    Christ  for 


THE  INVISIBLE  KING  101 

And  this  great  adventurer  out  of  the  hearts  of  man 
that  we  here  call  God,  they  would  present  as  the 
same  with  that  teacher  from  Galilee  who  was  cru- 
cified at  Jerusalem. 

Now  we  of  the  modern  way  would  offer  the  fol- 
lowing criticisms  upon  this  apparent  compromise 
between  our  faith  and  the  current  religion. 
Firstly,  we  do  not  presume  to  theorise  about  the 
nature  of  the  veiled  being  nor  about  that  being's 
relations  to  God  and  to  Life.  We  do  not  recognise 
any  consistent  sympathetic  possibilities  between 
these  outer  beings  and  our  God.  Our  God  is,  we 
feel,  like  Prometheus,  a  rebel.  He  is  unfilial. 
And  the  accepted  figure  of  Jesus,  instinct  with 
meek  submission,  is  not  in  the  tone  of  our  worship. 
It  is  not  by  suffering  that  God  conquers  death,  but 
by  fighting.  Incidentally  our  God  dies  a  million 
deaths,  but  the  thing  that  matters  is  not  the  deaths 
but  the  immortality.  It  may  be  he  cannot  escape 
in  this  person  or  that  person  being  nailed  to  a 
cross  or  chained  to  be  torn  by  vultures  on  a  rock. 
These  may  be  necessary  sufferings,  like  hunger  and 
thirst  in  a  campaign;  they  do  not  in  themselves 

him  is  the  wisdom  of  God  manifested  in  all  things,  and  chiefly 
in  the  mind  of  man.  Through  him  we  reach  the  blessedness  of 
an  intuitive  knowledge  of  God.  Salvation  is  an  escape  from 
the  "inadequate"  ideas  of  the  mortal  human  personality  to 
the  "  adequate "  and  timeless  ideas  of  God. 


102  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

bring  victory.  They  may  be  necessary,  but  they 
are  not  glorious.  The  symbol  of  the  crucifixion, 
the  drooping,  pain-drenched  figure  of  Christ,  the 
sorrowful  cry  to  his  Father,  "  My  God,  my  God, 
why  hast  thou  forsaken  me?  "  these  things  jar  with 
our  spirit.  We  little  men  may  well  fail  and  re- 
pent, but  it  is  our  faith  that  our  God  does  not  fail 
us  nor  himself.  We  cannot  accept  the  Christian's 
crucifix,  or  pray  to  a  pitiful  God.  We  cannot  ac- 
cept the  Resurrection  as  though  it  were  an  after- 
thought to  a  bitterly  felt  death.  Our  crucifix,  if 
you  must  have  a  crucifix,  would  show  God  with  a 
hand  or  a  foot  already  torn  away  from  its  nail, 
and  with  eyes  not  downcast  but  resolute  against 
the  sky;  a  face  without  pain,  pain  lost  and  forgot- 
ten in  the  surpassing  glory  of  the  struggle  and  the 
inflexible  will  to  live  and  prevail.  .  .  . 

But  we  do  not  care  how  long  the  thorns  are 
drawn,  nor  how  terrible  the  wounds,  so  long  as  he 
does  not  droop.  God  is  courage.  God  is  courage 
beyond  any  conceivable  suffering. 

But  when  all  this  has  been  said,  it  is  well  to 
add  that  it  concerns  the  figure  of  Christ  only  in 
80  far  as  that  professes  to  be  the  figure  of  God, 
and  the  crucifix  only  so  far  as  that  stands  for 
divine  action.     The  figure  of  Christ  crucified,  so 


THE  INVISIBLE  KING  103 

soon  as  we  think  of  it  as  being  no  more  than  the 
tragic  memorial  of  Jesus,  of  the  man  who  pro- 
claimed the  loving-kindness  of  God  and  the  su- 
premacy of  God's  kingdom  over  the  individual  life, 
and  who,  in  the  extreme  agony  of  his  pain  and 
exhaustion,  cried  out  that  he  was  deserted,  be- 
comes something  altogether  distinct  from  a  theo- 
logical symbol.  Immediately  that  we  cease  to 
worship,  we  can  begin  to  love  and  pity.  Here  was 
a  being  of  extreme  gentleness  and  delicacy  and 
of  great  courage,  of  the  utmost  tolerance  and 
the  subtlest  sympathy,  a  saint  of  non-resis- 
tance. .  .  . 

We  of  the  new  faith  repudiate  the  teaching  of 
non-resistance.  We  are  the  militant  followers  of 
and  participators  in  a  militant  God.  We  can  ap- 
preciate and  admire  the  greatness  of  Christ,  this 
gentle  being  upon  whose  nobility  the  theologians 
trade.  But  submission  is  the  remotest  quality  of 
all  from  our  God,  and  a  moribund  figure  is  the 
completest  inversion  of  his  likeness  as  we  know 
him.  A  Christianity  which  shows,  for  its  daily 
symbol,  Christ  risen  and  trampling  victoriously 
upon  a  broken  cross,  would  be  far  more  in  the  spirit 
of  our  worship.^ 

1  It  is  curious,  after  writing  the  above,  to  find  in  a  letter 


104  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

§  4  The  Primary  Duties 
Now  it  follows  very  directly  from  the  conception 
of  God  as  a  finite  intelligence  of  boundless  courage 
and  limitless  possibilities  of  growth  and  victory, 
who  has  pitted  himself  against  death,  wiio  stands 
close  to  our  inmost  beings  ready  to  receive  us  and 
use  us,  to  rescue  us  from  the  chagrins  of  egotism 
and  take  us  into  his  immortal  adventure,  that  we 
who  have  realised  him  and  given  ourselves  joyfully 
to  him,  must  needs  be  equally  ready  and  willing  to 
give  oujr  energies  to  the  task  we  share  with  him,  to 

written  by  Foss  Westcott,  BisJiop  of  Durham,  to  that  pertinaci- 
ous correspondent,  tlie-  late  La.dy  Victoria  Welby,  almost  ex- 
actly the  same  senitiments  I  have  here  expressed.  "  If  I 
could  fill  the  Crucifix  with  life  as  you  do,"  he  says,  "  I  would 
gladly  look  on  it,  hut  the  fallen  Head  and  the  closed  Eye 
exclude  from  my  thought  the  idea  of  glorified  humanity.  The 
Christ  to  whom-  we  are  led  is  One  who  *  hath  been  crucified,' 
who  hath  passed  the  trial  victoriously  and  borne  the  fruits 
to  heaven.     I  dare  not  then  rest  on  this  side  of  the  glory." 

I  find,  too,  a  still  more  remarkable  expression  of  the  modern 
spirit  in  a  tract,  "  The  Call  of  the  Kingdom,"  by  that  very  able 
and  subtle,  Anglican  theologian,  the  Rev.  W.  Temple,  who 
declares  that  under  the  vitalising  stresses  of  the  war  we  are 
winning  "  faith  in  Christ  as  an  heroic  leader.  We  have  thought 
of  Ilim  so  much  as  meek  and  gentle  that  there  is  no  ground 
in  our  picture  of  Him,  for  the  vision  which  His  disciple  had 
of  Him  :  '  His  head  and  His  hair  were  white,  as  white  wool, 
white  as  snow;  and  His  eyes  were  as  a  flame  of  fire;  and  His 
feet  like  unto  burnished  brass,  as  if  it  had  been  refined  in  a 
furnace ;  and  His  voice  was  as  the  voice  of  many  waters.  And 
He  had  in  His  right  hand  seven  stars;  and  out  of  His  mouth 
proceeded  a  sharp  two-edged  sword;  and  His  countenance  was 
as  the  sun  shineth  in  its  strength.' " 

These  are  both  exceptional  utterances,  interesting  as  showing 
how  clearly  parallel  are  the  tendencies  within  and  without 
Christianity. 


THE  INVISIBLE  KING  105 

do  our  utmost  to  increase  knowledge,  to  increase 
order  and  clearness,  to  fight  against  indolence, 
waste,  disorder,  cruelty,  vice,  and  every  form  of 
his  and  our  enemy,  death,  first  and  chief  est  in  our- 
selves but  also  in  all  mankind,  and  to  bring  about 
the  establishment  of  his  real  and  visible  kingdom 
throughout  the  world. 

And  that  idea  of  God  as  the  Invisible  King  of 
the  whole  world  means  not  merely  that  God  is  to 
be  made  and  declared  the  head  of  the  world,  but 
that  the  kingdom  of  God  is  to  be  present  through- 
out the  whole  fabric  of  the  world,  that  the  King- 
dom of  God  is  to  be  in  the  teaching  at  the  village 
school,  in  the  planning  of  the  railway  siding  of 
the  market  town,  in  the  mixing  of  the  mortar  at 
the  building  of  the  workman's  house.  It  means 
that  ultimately  no  effigy  of  intrusive  king  or  em- 
peror is  to  disfigure  our  coins  and  stamps  any 
more;  God  himself  and  no  delegate  is  to  be  repre- 
sented wherever  men  buy  or  sell,  on  our  letters 
and  our  receipts,  a  perpetual  witness,  a  perpetual 
reminder.  There  is  no  act  altogether  without  sig- 
nificance, no  power  so  humble  that  it  may  not 
be  used  for  or  against  God,  no  life  but  can  orient 
itself  to  him.  To  realise  God  in  one's  heart  is 
to  be  filled  with  the  desire  to  serve  him,  and  the 


106  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

way  of  his  service  is  neither  to  pull  up  one's  life 
by  the  roots  nor  to  continue  it  in  all  its  essentials 
unchanged,  but  to  turn  it  about,  to  turn  everything 
that  there  is  in  it  round  into  his  way. 

The  outward  duty  of  those  who  serve  God  must 
vary  greatly  with  the  abilities  they  possess  and 
the  positions  in  which  they  find  themselves,  but 
for  all  there  are  certain  fundamental  duties;  a  con- 
stant attempt  to  be  utterly  truthful  with  oneself, 
a  constant  sedulousness  to  keep  oneself  fit  and 
bright  for  God's  service,  and  to  increase  one's 
knowledge  and  powers,  and  a  hidden  persistent 
watchfulness  of  one's  baser  motives,  a  watch  against 
fear  and  indolence,  against  vanity,  against  greed 
and  lust,  against  envy,  malice,  and  uncharitable- 
ness.  To  have  found  God  truly  does  in  itself  make 
God's  sei'vice  one's  essential  motive,  but  these  evils 
lurk  in  the  shadows,  in  the  lassitudes  and  unwary 
moments.  No  one  escapes  them  altogether,  there 
is  no  need  for  tragic  moods  on  account  of  imper- 
fections. We  can  no  more  serve  God  without 
blunders  and  set-backs  than  we  can  win  battles 
without  losing  men.  But  the  less  of  such  loss  the 
better.  The  servant  of  God  must  keep  his  mind 
as  wide  and  sound  and  his  motives  as  clean  as  he 
can,  just  as  an  operating  surgeon  must  keep  his 


THE  INVISIBLE  KING  107 

nerves  and  muscles  as  fit  and  his  hands  as  clean 
as  he  can.  Neither  may  righteously  evade  exer- 
cise and  regular  washing  —  of  mind  as  of  hands. 
An  incessant  watchfulness  of  one's  self  and  one's 
thoughts  and  the  soundness  of  one's  thoughts; 
cleanliness,  clearness,  a  wariness  against  indolence 
and  prejudice,  careful  truth,  habitual  frankness, 
fitness  and  steadfast  work ;  these  are  the  daily  fun- 
damental duties  that  every  one  who  truly  comes  to 
God  will,  as  a  matter  of  course,  set  before  himself. 

§  5  The  Increasing  Kingdom 
Now  of  the  more  intimate  and  personal  life  of 
the  believer  it  will  be  more  convenient  to  write  a 
little  later.  Let  us  for  the  present  pursue  the  idea 
of  this  world-kingdom  of  God,  to  whose  establish- 
ment he  calls  us.  This  kingdom  is  to  be  a  peaceful 
and  co-ordinated  activity  of  all  mankind  upon  cer- 
tain divine  ends.  These,  we  conceive,  are  first,  the 
maintenance  of  the  racial  life;  secondly,  the  ex- 
ploration of  the  external  being  of  nature  as  it  is 
and  as  it  has  been,  that  is  to  say  history  and  sci- 
ence; thirdly,  that  exploration  of  inherent  human 
possibility  which  is  art ;  fourthly,  that  clarification 
of  thought  and  knowledge  which  is  philosophy; 
and  finally,  the  progressive  enlargement  and  de- 


108  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

velopment  of  the  racial  life  under  these  lights,  so 
that  God  may  work  through  a  continually  better 
body  of  humanity  and  through  better  and  better 
equipped  minds,  that  he  and  our  race  may  increase 
for  ever,  working  unendingly  upon  the  development 
of  the  powers  of  life  and  the  mastery  of  the  blind 
forces  of  matter  throughout  the  deeps  of  space. 
He  sets  out  with  us,  w^e  are  persuaded,  to  conquer 
ourselves  and  our  world  and  the  stars.  And  be- 
yond the  stars  our  eyes  can  as  yet  see  nothing,  our 
imaginations  reach  and  fail.  Beyond  the  limits 
of  our  understanding  is  the  veiled  Being  of  Fate, 
whose  face  is  hidden  from  us.  .  .  . 

It  may  be  that  minds  will  presently  appear  among 
us  of  such  a  quality  that  the  face  of  that  Unknown 
will  not  be  altogether  hidden.  .  .  . 

But  the  business  of  such  ordinary  lives  as  ours 
is  the  setting  up  of  this  earthly  kingdom  of  God. 
That  is  the  form  into  which  our  lives  must  fall  and 
our  consciences  adapt  themselves. 

Belief  in  God  as  the  Invisible  King  brings  with 
it  almost  necessarily  a  conception  of  this  coming 
kingdom  of  God  on  earth.  Each  believer  as  he 
grasps  this  natural  and  immediate  consequence  of 
the  faith  that  has  come  into  his  life  will  form  at  the 
same   time   a   Utopian   conception   of   this  world 


THE  INVISIBLE  KING  109 

changed  in  the  direction  of  God's  purpose.  The 
vision  will  follow  the  realisation  of  God's  true  na- 
ture and  purpose  as  a  necessary  second  step.  And 
he  will  begin  to  develop  the  latent  citizen  of  this 
world-state  in  himself.  He  will  fall  in  with  the 
idea  of  the  world-wide  sanities  of  this  new  order 
being  drawn  over  the  warring  outlines  of  the  pres- 
ent, and  of  men  falling  out  of  relationship  with  the 
old  order  and  into  relationship  with  the  new. 
Many  men  and  women  are  already  working  to-day 
at  tasks  that  belong  essentially  to  God's  kingdom, 
tasks  that  would  be  of  the  same  essential  nature  if 
the  world  w^ere  now  a  theocracy ;  for  example,  they 
are  doing  or  sustaining  scientific  research  or  edu- 
cation or  creative  art;  they  are  making  roads  to 
bring  men  together,  they  are  doctors  working  for 
the  world's  health,  they  are  building  homes,  they 
are  constructing  machinery  to  save  and  increase 
the  powers  of  men.  .  .  . 

Such  men  and  women  need  only  to  change  their 
orientation  as  men  will  change  about  at  a  work- 
table  when  the  light  that  was  coming  in  a  little 
while  ago  from  the  southern  windows,  begins  pres- 
ently to  come  in  chiefly  from  the  west,  to  become 
open  and  confessed  servants  of  God.  This  work 
that  they  were  doing  for  ambition,  or  the  love  of 


110  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

meu  or  the  love  of  knowledge  or  what  seemed  the 
inherent  impulse  to  the  work  itself,  or  for  money 
or  honour  or  country  or  king,  they  will  realise  they 
are  doing  for  God  and  by  the  power  of  God.  Self- 
transformation  into  a  citizen  of  God's  kingdom  and 
a  new  realisation  of  all  earthly  politics  as  no  more 
than  the  struggle  to  define  and  achieve  the  kingdom 
of  God  in  the  earth,  follow  on,  without  any  need 
for  a  fresh  spiritual  impulse,  from  the  moment 
when  God  and  the  believer  meet  and  clasp  one  an- 
other. 

This  transfiguration  of  the  world  into  a  theocracy 
may  seem  a  merely  fantastic  idea  to  anyone  who 
comes  to  it  freshly  without  such  general  theological 
preparation  as  the  preceding  pages  have  made. 
But  to  anyone  who  has  been  at  the  pains  to  clear 
his  mind  even  a  little  from  the  obsession  of  existing 
but  transitory  things,  it  ceases  to  be  a  mere  sugges- 
tion and  becomes  more  and  more  manifestly  the 
real  future  of  mankind.  From  the  phase  of  "  so 
things  should  be,"  the  mind  will  pass  very  rapidly  to 
the  realisation  that  "  so  things  will  be."  Towards 
this  the  directive  wills  among  men  have  been  drift- 
ing more  and  more  steadily  and  perceptibly  and 
with  fewer  eddyings  and  retardations,  for  many 
centuries.     The  purpose  of  mankind  will  not  be 


THE  INVISIBLE  KING  111 

always  thus  confused  and  fragmentary.  This  dis- 
semination of  will-power  is  a  phase.  The  age  of 
the  warring  tribes  and  kingdoms  and  empires  that 
began  a  hundred  centuries  or  so  ago,  draws  to  its 
close.  The  kingdom  of  God  on  earth  is  not  a  meta- 
phor, not  a  mere  spiritual  state,  not  a  dream,  not 
an  uncertain  project ;  it  is  the  thing  before  us,  it  is 
the  close  and  inevitable  destiny  of  mankind. 

In  a  few  score  years  the  faith  of  the  true  God 
will  be  spreading  about  the  world.  The  few  halt- 
ing confessions  of  God  that  one  hears  here  and 
there  to-day,  like  that  little  twittering  of  birds 
which  comes  before  the  dawn,  will  have  swollen  to 
a  choral  unanimity.  In  but  a  few  centuries  the 
whole  world  will  be  openly,  confessedly,  preparing 
for  the  kingdom.  In  but  a  few  centuries  God  will 
have  led  us  out  of  the  dark  forest  of  these  present 
wars  and  confusions  into  the  open  brotherhood  of 
his  rule. 

§  6    What  is  my  Place  in  the  Kingdom? 

This  conception  of  the  general  life  of  mankind 
as  a  transformation  at  thousands  of  points  of  the 
confused,  egotistical,  proprietary,  partisan,  nation- 
alist, life-wasting  chaos  of  human  life  to-day  into 
the  coherent  development  of  the  world  kingdom  of 


112  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

God,  provides  the  form  into  which  everyone  who 
comes  to  the  knowledge  of  God  will  naturally  seek 
to  fit  his  every  thought  and  activity.  The  material 
greeds,  the  avarice,  fear,  rivalries,  and  ignoble  am- 
bitions of  a  disordered  world  will  be  challenged 
and  examined  under  one  general  question :  "  What 
am  I  in  the  kingdom  of  God?  " 

It  has  already  been  suggested  that  there  is  a 
great  and  growing  number  of  occupations  that  be- 
long already  to  God's  kingdom,  research,  teaching, 
creative  art,  creative  administration,  cultivation, 
construction,  maintenance,  and  the  honest  satis- 
faction of  honest  practical  human  needs.  For  such 
people  conversion  to  the  intimacy  of  God  means  at 
'most  a  change  in  the  spirit  of  their  work,  a  refreshed 
energy,  a  clearer  understanding,  a  new  zeal,  a  com- 
pleter disregard  of  gains  and  praises  and  promo- 
tion. Pay,  honours,  and  the  like  cease  to  be  the 
inducement  of  effort.  Service,  and  service  alone, 
is  the  criterion  that  the  quickened  conscience  will 
recognise. 

Most  of  such  people  will  find  themselves  in  po- 
Bitions  in  which  service  is  mingled  with  activities 
of  a  baser  sort,  in  which  service  is  a  little  warped 
and  deflected  by  old  traditions  and  usage,  by  mer- 
cenary  and   commercial   considerations,   by   some 


THE  INVISIBLE  KING  113 

inherent  or  special  degradation  of  purpose.  The 
spirit  of  God  will  not  let  the  believer  rest  until  his 
life  is  readjusted  and  as  far  as  possible  freed  from 
the  waste  of  these  base  diversions.  For  example 
a  scientific  investigator,  lit  and  inspired  by  great 
inquiries,  may  be  hampered  by  the  conditions  of 
his  professorship  or  research  fellowship,  which  ex- 
act an  appearance  of  "  practical  "  results.  Or  he 
may  be  obliged  to  lecture  or  conduct  classes.  He 
may  be  able  to  give  but  half  his  possible  gift  to  the 
work  of  his  real  aptitude,  and  that  at  a  sacrifice  of 
money  and  reputation  among  short-sighted  but  in- 
fluential contemporaries.  Well,  if  he  is  by  nature 
an  investigator  he  will  know  that  the  research  is 
what  God  needs  of  him.  He  cannot  continue  it  at 
all  if  he  leaves  his  position,  and  so  he  must  needs 
waste  something  of  his  gift  to  save  the  rest.  But 
should  a  poorer  or  a  humbler  post  offer  him  better 
opportunity,  there  lies  his  work  for  God.  There 
one  has  a  very  common  and  simple  type  of  the  prob- 
lems that  will  arise  in  the  lives  of  men  when  they 
are  lit  by  sudden  realisation  of  the  immediacy  of 
God. 

Akin  to  that  case  is  the  perplexity  of  any  success- 
ful physician  between  the  increase  of  knowledge 
and  the  public  welfare  on  the  one  hand,  and  the 


114  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

lucrative  possibilities  of  his  practice  among  wealthy 
people  on  the  other.  He  belongs  to  a  profession 
that  is  crippled  by  a  mediaeval  code,  a  profession 
which  was  blind  to  the  common  interest  of  the 
Public  Health  and  regarded  its  members  merely  as 
skilled  practitioners  employed  to  "  cure  "  individual 
ailments.  Very  slowly  and  tortuously  do  the  meth- 
ods of  the  profession  adapt  themselves  to  the  mod- 
ern conception  of  an  army  of  devoted  men  working 
as  a  whole  under  God  for  the  health  of  mankind 
as  a  whole,  broadening  out  from  the  frowsy  den  of 
the  "  leech,"  with  its  crocodile  and  bottles  and  hi- 
eroglyphic prescriptions,  to  a  skilled  and  illuminat- 
ing co-operation  with  those  who  deal  with  the  food 
and  housing  and  economic  life  of  the  community. 

And  again  quite  parallel  with  these  personal 
problems  is  the  trouble  of  the  artist  between  the 
market  and  \Tilgar  fame  on  the  one  hand  and  his 
divine  impulse  on  the  other. 

The  presence  of  God  will  be  a  continual  light  and 
help  in  every  decision  that  must  be  made  by  men 
and  women  in  these  more  or  less  vitiated,  but  still 
fundamentally  useful  and  righteous,  positions. 

The  trouble  becomes  more  marked  and  more  dif- 
ficult in  the  case  of  a  man  who  is  a  manufacturer 
or  a  trader,  the  financier  of  business  enterprise  or 


THE  INVISIBLE  KING  115 

the  proprietor  of  great  estates.  The  world  is  in 
need  of  manufactures  and  that  goods  should  be 
distributed;  land  must  be  administered  and  new 
economic  possibilities  developed.  The  drift  of 
things  is  in  the  direction  of  state  ownership  and 
control,  but  in  a  great  number  of  cases  the  state  is 
not  ripe  for  such  undertakings,  it  commands 
neither  sufficient  integrity  nor  sufficient  ability,  and 
the  proprietor  of  factory,  store,  credit  or  land,  must 
continue  in  possession,  holding  as  a  trustee  for 
God  and,  so  far  as  lies  in  his  power,  preparing  for 
his  supersession  by  some  more  public  administra- 
tion. Modern  religion  admits  of  no  facile  flights 
from  responsibility.  It  permits  no  headlong  resort 
to  the  wilderness  and  sterile  virtue.  It  counts  the 
recluse  who  fasts  among  scorpions  in  a  cave  as  no 
better  than  a  deserter  in  hiding.  It  unhesitatingly 
forbids  any  rich  young  man  to  sell  all  that  he  has 
and  give  to  the  poor.  Himself  and  all  that  he  has 
must  be  alike  dedicated  to  God. 

The  plain  duty  that  will  be  understood  by  the 
proprietor  of  land  and  of  every  sort  of  general 
need  and  service,  so  soon  as  he  becomes  aware  of 
God,  is  so  to  administer  his  possessions  as  to  achieve 
the  maximum  of  possible  efficiency,  the  most  gen- 
erous output,  and  the  least  private  profit.     He  may 


116  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

set  aside  a  salary  for  his  maintenance;  the  rest  he 
must  deal  with  like  a  zealous  public  official.  And 
if  he  perceives  that  the  affair  could  be  better  ad- 
ministered by  other  hands  than  his  own,  then  it  is 
his  business  to  get  it  into  those  hands  with  the 
smallest  delay  and  the  least  profit  to  himself.  .  .  . 

The  rights  and  wrongs  of  human  equity  are  very 
different  from  right  and  wrong  in  the  sight  of  God. 
In  the  sight  of  God  no  landlord  has  a  right  to  his 
rent,  no  usurer  has  a  right  to  his  interest.  A  man 
is  not  justified  in  drawing  the  profits  from  an  ad- 
vantageous agreement  nor  free  to  spend  the  profits 
of  a  speculation  as  he  will.  God  takes  no  heed  of 
savings  nor  of  abstinence.  He  recognises  no  right 
to  the  "rewards  of  abstinence,"  no  right  to  any 
rewards.  Those  profits  and  comforts  and  consola- 
tions are  the  inducements  that  dangle  before  the 
eyes  of  the  spiritually  blind.  Wealth  is  an  em- 
barrassment to  the  religious,  for  God  calls  them  to 
account  for  it.  The  servant  of  God  has  no  business 
with  wealth  or  power  except  to  use  them  immedi- 
ately in  the  service  of  God.  Finding  these  things 
in  his  hands  he  is  bound  to  administer  them  in  the 
service  of  God. 

The  tendency  of  modern  religion  goes  far  beyond 
the  alleged  communism  of  the  early  Christians,  and 


THE  INVISIBLE  KING  117 

far  beyond  the  tithes  of  the  scribes  and  Pharisees. 
God  takes  all.  He  takes  you,  blood  and  bones  and 
house  and  acres,  he  takes  skill  and  influence  and 
expectations.  For  all  the  rest  of  your  life  you  are 
nothing  but  God's  agent.  If  you  are  not  prepared 
for  so  complete  a  surrender,  then  you  are  infinitely 
remote  from  God.  You  must  go  your  way.  Here 
you  are  merely  a  curious  interloper.  Perhaps  you 
have  been  desiring  God  as  an  experience,  or  covet- 
ing him  as  a  possession.  You  have  not  begun  to 
understand.  This  that  we  are  discussing  in  this 
book  is  as  yet  nothing  for  you. 

§  7  Adjusting  Life 
This  picturing  of  a  human  world  more  to  the  mind 
of  God  than  this  present  world  and  the  discov- 
ery and  realisation  of  one's  own  place  and  work 
in  and  for  that  kingdom  of  God,  is  the  natural  next 
phase  in  the  development  of  the  believer.  He  will 
set  about  revising  and  adjusting  his  scheme  of  life, 
his  ways  of  living,  his  habits  and  his  relationships 
in  the  light  of  his  new  convictions. 

Most  men  and  women  who  come  to  God  will  have 
already  a  certain  righteousness  in  their  lives ;  these 
things  happen  like  a  thunderclap  only  in  strange 
exceptional  cases,  and  the  same  movements  of  the 


118  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

mind  that  have  brought  them  to  God  will  already 
have  brought  their  lives  into  a  certain  rightness 
of  direction  and  conduct.  Yet  occasionally  there 
will  be  someone  to  whom  the  self-examination  that 
follows  conversion  will  reveal  an  entirely  wrong 
and  evil  way  of  living.  It  may  be  that  the  light 
has  come  to  some  rich  idler  doing  nothing  but  fol- 
low a  pleasurable  routine.  Or  to  someone  follow- 
ing some  highly  profitable  and  amusing,  but  socially 
useless  or  socially  mischievous  occupation.  One 
may  be  an  advocate  at  the  disposal  of  any  man's 
purpose,  or  an  actor  or  actress  ready  to  fall  in  with 
any  theatrical  enterprise.  Or  a  woman  may  find 
herself  a  prostitute  or  a  pet  wife,  a  mere  kept  in- 
strument of  indulgence.  These  are  lives  of  prey, 
these  are  lives  of  futility ;  the  light  of  God  will  not 
tolerate  such  lives.  Here  religion  can  bring  noth- 
ing but  a  severance  from  the  old  way  of  life  alto- 
gether, a  break  and  a  struggle  towards  use  and 
service  and  dignity. 

But  even  here  it  does  not  follow  that  because 
a  life  has  been  wrong  the  new  life  that  begins 
must  be  far  as  the  poles  asunder  from  the  old. 
Every  sort  of  experience  that  has  ever  come  to  a 
human  being  is  in  the  self  that  he  brings  to  God, 
and  there  is  no  reason  why  a  knowledge  of  evil 


THE  INVISIBLE  KING  119 

ways  should  not  determine  the  path  of  duty.  No 
one  can  better  devise  protections  against  vices  than 
those  who  have  practised  them ;  none  know  tempta- 
tions better  than  those*  who  have  fallen.  If  a  man 
has  followed  an  evil  trade,  it  becomes  him  to  use 
his  knowledge  of  the  tricks  of  that  trade  to  help 
end  it.  He  knows  the  charities  it  may  claim  and 
the  remedies  it  needs.  .  .  . 

A  very  interesting  case  to  discuss  in  relation  to 
this  question  of  adjustment  is  that  of  the  barrister. 
A  practising  barrister  under  contemporary  condi- 
tions does  indeed  give  most  typically  the  oppor- 
tunity for  examining  the  relation  of  an  ordinary 
self-respecting  wordly  life,  to  life  under  the  dis- 
pensation of  God  discovered.  A  barrister  is  usually 
a  man  of  some  energy  and  ambition,  his  honour  is 
moulded  by  the  traditions  of  an  ancient  and  anti- 
quated profession,  instinctively  self-preserving  and 
yet  with  a  real  desire  for  consistency  and  respect. 
As  a  profession  it  has  been  greedy  and  defensively 
conservative,  but  it  has  never  been  shameless  nor 
has  it  ever  broken  faith  with  its  own  large  and 
selfish,  but  quite  definite,  propositions.  It  has 
never  for  instance  had  the  shamelessness  of  such  a 
traditionless  and  undisciplined  class  as  the  early 
factory  organisers.     It  has  never  had  the  dull  in- 


120  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

coherent  wickedness  of  the  sort  of  men  who  exploit 
drunkenness  and  the  turf.  It  offends  within  lim- 
its. Barristers  can  be,  and  are,  disbarred.  But 
it  is  now  a  profession  extraordinarily  out  of  date; 
its  code  of  honour  derives  from  a  time  of  cruder  and 
lower  conceptions  of  human  relationship.  It  ap- 
prehends the  State  as  a  mere  "  ring  "  kept  about 
private  disputations;  it  has  not  begun  to  move  to- 
wards the  modern  conception  of  the  collective  en- 
terprise as  the  determining  criterion  of  human  con- 
duct. It  sees  its  business  as  a  mere  play  upon  the 
rules  of  a  game  between  man  and  man,  or  between 
men  and  men.  They  haggle,  they  dispute,  they  in- 
flict and  suffer  wrongs,  they  evade  dues,  and  are 
liable  or  entitled  to  penalties  and  compensations. 
The  primary  business  of  the  law  is  held  to  be  de- 
cision in  these  wrangles,  and  as  wrangling  is  sub- 
ject to  artistic  elaboration,  the  business  of  the  bar- 
rister is  the  business  of  a  professional  wrangler; 
he  is  a  bravo  in  wig  and  gown  who  fights  the  duels 
of  ordinary  men  because  they  are  incapable,  very 
largely  on  account  of  the  complexities  of  legal  pro- 
cedure, of  fighting  for  themselves.  His  business  is 
never  to  explore  any  fundamental  right  in  the  mat- 
ter. His  business  is  to  say  all  that  can  be  said 
for  his  client,  and  to  conceal  or  minimise  whatever 


THE  INVISIBLE  KING  121 

can  be  said  against  his  client.  The  successful  pro- 
moted advocate,  who  in  Britain  and  the  United 
States  of  America  is  the  judge,  and  whose  habits 
and  interests  all  incline  him  to  disregard  the  reali- 
ties of  the  case  in  favour  of  the  points  in  the  forensic 
game,  then  adjudicates  upon  the  contest.  .  .  . 

Now  this  condition  of  things  is  clearly  incom- 
patible with  the  modern  conception  of  the  world 
as  becoming  a  divine  kingdom.  When  the  world 
is  openly  and  confessedly  the  kingdom  of  God,  the 
law  court  will  exist  only  to  adjust  the  differing 
views  of  men  as  to  the  manner  of  their  service  to 
God;  the  only  right  of  action  one  man  will  have 
against  another  will  be  that  he  has  been  prevented 
or  hampered  or  distressed  by  the  other  in  serving 
God.  The  idea  of  the  law  court  will  have  changed 
entirely  from  a  place  of  dispute,  exaction  and  ven- 
geance, to  a  place  of  adjustment.  The  individual 
or  some  state  organisation  will  plead  on  behalf  of 
the  common  good  either  against  some  state  official 
or  state  regulation,  or  against  the  actions  or  inac- 
tion of  another  individual.  This  is  the  only  sort 
of  legal  proceedings  compatible  with  the  broad 
beliefs  of  the  new  faith.  .  .  .  Every  religion  that 
becomes  ascendant,  in  so  far  as  it  is  not  other- 
worldly, must  necessarily  set  its  stamp  upon  the 


122  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

methods  and  administration  of  the  law.  That  this 
was  not  the  ease  with  Christianity  is  one  of  the 
many  contributory  aspects  that  lead  one  to  the  con- 
viction that  it  was  not  Christianity  that  took  pos- 
session of  the  Roman  empire,  but  an  imperial  ad- 
venturer who  took  possession  of  an  all  too  com- 
plaisant Christianity. 

Reverting  now  from  these  generalisations  to  the 
problem  of  the  religious  from  which  they  arose,  it 
will  have  become  evident  that  the  essential  work 
of  anyone  who  is  conversant  with  the  existing  prac- 
tice and  literature  of  the  law  and  whose  natural 
abilities  are  forensic,  will  lie  in  the  direction  of 
reconstructing  the  theory  and  practice  of  the  law 
in  harmony  with  modern  conceptions,  of  making 
that  theory  and  practice  clear  and  plain  to  ordinary 
men,  of  reforming  the  abuses  of  the  profession  by 
working  for  the  separation  of  bar  and  judiciary, 
for  the  amalgamation  of  the  solicitors  and  the  bar- 
risters, and  the  like  needed  reforms.  These  are 
matters  that  will  probably  only  be  properly  set  right 
by  a  quickening  of  conscience  among  lawyers  them- 
selves. Of  no  class  of  men  is  the  help  and  service 
so  necessary  to  the  practical  establishment  of  God's 
kingdom,  as  of  men  learned  and  experienced  in  the 
law.     And  there  is  no  reason  why  for  the  present 


THE  INVISIBLE  KING  123 

an  advocate  should  not  continue  to  plead  in  the 
courts,  provided  he  does  his  utmost  only  to  handle 
cases  in  which  he  believes  he  can  serve  the  right. 
Few  righteous  cases  are  ill-served  by  a  frank  dis- 
position on  the  part  of  lawyer  and  client  to  put 
everything  before  the  court.  Thereby  of  course 
there  arises  a  difficult  case  of  conscience.  What 
if  a  lawyer,  believing  his  client  to  be  in  the  right, 
discovers  him  to  be  in  the  w^'ong?  He  cannot 
throw  up  the  case  unless  he  has  been  scandalously 
deceived,  because  so  he  would  betray  the  confidence 
his  client  has  put  in  him  to  "  see  him  through." 
He  has  a  right  to  "  give  himself  away,"  but  not  to 
"  give  away  "  his  client  in  this  fashion.  If  he  has 
a  chance  of  a  private  consultation  I  think  he  ought 
to  do  his  best  to  make  his  client  admit  the  truth  of 
the  case  and  give  in,  but  failing  this  he  has  no 
right  to  be  virtuous  on  behalf  of  another.  No  man 
may  play  God  to  another ;  he  may  remonstrate,  but 
that  is  the  limit  of  his  right.  He  must  respect  a 
confidence,  even  if  it  is  purely  implicit  and  involun- 
tary. I  admit  that  here  the  barrister  is  in  a  cleft 
stick,  and  that  he  must  see  the  business  through 
according  to  the  confidence  his  client  has  put  in 
him  —  and  afterwards  be  as  sorry  as  he  may  be  if 
an  injustice  ensues.    And  also  I  would  suggest  a 


124  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

lawyer  may  with  a  fairly  good  conscience  defend 
a  guilty  man  as  if  he  were  innocent,  to  save  him 
from  unjustly  heavy  penalties.  .  .  . 

This  comparatively  full  discussion  of  the  bar- 
rister's problem  has  been  embarked  upon  because 
it  does  bring  in,  in  a  very  typical  fashion,  just  those 
uncertainties  and  imperfections  that  abound  in  real 
life.  Religious  conviction  gives  us  a  general  di- 
rection, but  it  stands  aside  from  many  of  these 
entangled  struggles  in  the  jungle  of  conscience. 
Practice  is  often  easier  than  a  rule.  In  practice 
a  lawyer  will  know  far  more  accurately  than  a  hy- 
pothetical case  can  indicate,  how  far  he  is  bound 
to  see  his  client  through,  and  how  far  he  may  play 
the  keeper  of  his  client's  conscience.  And  nearly 
every  day  there  happens  instances  where  the  most 
subtle  casuistry  will  fail  and  the  finger  of  con- 
science point  unhesitatingly.  One  may  have  wor- 
ried long  in  the  preparation  and  preliminaries  of 
the  issue,  one  may  bring  the  case  at  last  into  the 
final  court  of  conscience  in  an  apparently  hopeless 
tangle.     Then  suddenly  comes  decision. 

The  procedure  of  that  silent,  lit,  and  empty  court 
in  which  a  man  states  his  case  to  God,  is  very  sim- 
ple and  perfect.     The  excuses  and  the  special  plead- 


I 


J 


THE  INVISIBLE  KING  125 

ing  shrivel  and  vanish.     In  a  little  while  the  case 
lies  bare  and  plain. 

§  8  The  Oath  of  Allegiance 
The  question  of  oaths  of  allegiance,  acts  of  ac- 
quiescence in  existing  governments,  and  the  like, 
is  one  that  arises  at  once  with  the  acceptance  of 
God  as  the  supreme  and  real  King  of  the  Earth. 
At  the  worst  Caesar  is  a  usurper,  a  satrap  claiming 
to  be  sovereign ;  at  the  best  he  is  provisional.  Mod- 
ern casuistry  makes  no  great  trouble  for  the  be- 
lieving public  ofiflcial.  The  chief  business  of  any 
believer  is  to  do  the  work  for  which  he  is  best  fitted, 
and  since  all  state  affairs  are  to  become  the  affairs 
of  God's  kingdom  it  is  of  primary  importance  that 
they  should  come  into  the  hands  of  God's  servants. 
It  is  scarcely  less  necessary  to  a  believing  man  with 
administrative  gifts  that  he  should  be  in  the  public 
administration,  than  that  he  should  breathe  and 
eat.  And  whatever  oath  or  the  like  to  usurper 
church  or  usurper  king  has  been  set  up  to  bar  ac- 
cess to  service,  is  an  oath  imposed  under  duress. 
If  it  cannot  be  avoided  it  must  be  taken  rather  than 
that  a  man  should  become  unserviceable.  All  such 
oaths  are  unfair  and  foolish  things.     They  exclude 


126  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

no  scoundrels;  tliey  are  appeals  to  superstition. 
Whenever  an  opportunity  occurs  for  the  abolition 
of  an  oath,  the  servant  of  God  will  seize  it,  but 
where  the  oath  is  unavoidable  he  will  take  it. 

The  service  of  God  is  not  to  achieve  a  delicate 
consistency  of  statement ;  it  is  to  do  as  much  as  one 
can  of  God's  work. 

§  9  The  Priest  and  the  Creed 
It  may  be  doubted  if  this  line  of  reasoning  re- 
garding the  official  and  his  oath  can  be  extended  to 
excuse  the  priest  or  pledged  minister  of  religion 
who  finds  that  faith  in  the  true  God  has  ousted  his 
formal  beliefs. 

This  has  been  a  frequent  and  subtle  moral  prob- 
lem in  the  intellectual  life  of  the  last  hundred 
years.  It  has  been  increasingly  difficult  for  any 
class  of  reading,  talking,  and  discussing  people  such 
as  are  the  bulk  of  the  priesthoods  of  the  Christian 
churches  to  escape  hearing  and  reading  the  ac- 
cumulated criticism  of  the  Trinitarian  theology 
and  of  the  popularly  accepted  story  of  man's  fall 
and  salvation.  Some  have  no  doubt  defeated  this 
universal  and  insidious  critical  attack  entirely,  and 
honestly  established  themselves  in  a  right-down 
acceptance  of  the  articles  and  disciplines  to  which 


THE  INVISIBLE  KING  127 

they  have  subscribed  and  of  the  creeds  they  profess 
and  repeat.  Some  have  recanted  and  abandoned 
their  positions  in  the  priesthood.  But  a  great 
number  have  neither  resisted  the  bacillus  of  criti- 
cism nor  left  the  churches  to  which  they  are  at- 
tached. They  have  adopted  compromises,  they  have 
qualified  their  creeds  with  modifying  footnotes  of 
essential  repudiation ;  they  have  decided  that  plain 
statements  are  metaphors  and  have  undercut, 
transposed,  and  inverted  the  most  vital  points  of 
the  vulgarly  accepted  beliefs.  One  may  find  within 
the  Anglican  communion,  Arians,  Unitarians,  Athe- 
ists, disbelievers  in  immortality,  attenuators  of 
miracles;  there  is  scarcely  a  doubt  or  a  cavil  that 
has  not  found  a  lodgment  within  the  ample  charity 
of  the  English  Establishment.  I  have  been  inter- 
ested to  hear  one  distinguished  Canon  deplore  that 
"  they  "  did  not  identify  the  Logos  with  the  third 
instead  of  the  second  Person  of  the  Trinity,  and 
another  distinguished  Catholic  apologist  declare 
his  indifference  to  the  "  historical  Jesus."  Within 
most  of  the  Christian  communions  one  may  believe 
anything  or  nothing,  provided  only  that  one  does 
not  call  too  public  an  attention  to  one's  eccentricity. 
The  late  Rev.  Charles  Voysey,  for  example,  preached 
plainly  in  his  church  at  Healaugh  against  the  divin- 


128  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

ity  of  Christ,  unhindered.  It  was  only  when  he 
published  his  sermons  under  the  provocative  title 
of  "  The  Sling  and  the  Stone,"  and  caused  an  out- 
cry beyond  the  limits  of  his  congregation,  that  he 
was  indicted  and  deprived. 

Now  the  reasons  why  these  men  do  not  leave  the 
ministry  or  priesthood  in  which  they  find  themselves 
are  often  very  plausible.  It  is  probable  that  in 
very  few  cases  is  the  retention  of  stipend  or  incum- 
bency a  conscious  dishonesty.  At  the  worst  it  is 
mitigated  by  thought  for  wife  or  child.  It  has  only 
been  during  very  exceptional  phases  of  religious 
development  and  controversy  that  beliefs  have  been 
really  sharp.  A  creed,  like  a  coin,  it  may  be  argued, 
loses  little  in  practical  value  because  it  is  worn,  or 
bears  the  image  of  a  vanished  king.  The  religious 
life  is  a  reality  that  has  clothed  itself  in  many  gar- 
ments, and  the  concern  of  the  priest  or  minister  is 
with  the  religious  life  and  not  with  the  poor  sym- 
bols that  may  indeed  pretend  to  express,  but  do  as  a 
matter  of  fact  no  more  than  indicate,  its  direction. 
It  is  quite  possible  to  maintain  that  the  church  and 
not  the  creed  is  the  real  and  valuable  instrument  of 
religion,  that  the  religious  life  is  sustained  not  by 
its  propositions  but  by  its  routines.  Anyone  who 
seeks  the  intimate  discussion  of  spiritual  things 


THE  INVISIBLE  KING  129 

with  professional  divines,  will  find  this  is  the  sub- 
stance of  the  case  for  the  ecclesiastical  sceptic. 
His  church,  he  will  admit,  mumbles  its  statement 
of  truth,  but  where  else  is  truth?  What  better 
formulae  are  to  be  found  for  ineffable  things?  And 
meanwhile  —  he  does  good. 

That  may  be  a  valid  defence  before  a  man  finds 
God.  But  we  who  profess  the  w^orship  and  fellow- 
ship of  the  living  God  deny  that  religion  is  a  mat- 
ter of  ineffable  things.  The  way  of  God  is  plain 
and  simple  and  easy  to  understand. 

Therewith  the  whole  position  of  the  conforming 
sceptic  is  changed.  If  a  professional  religious  has 
any  justification  at  all  for  his  professionalism  it  is 
surely  that  he  proclaims  the  nearness  and  great- 
ness of  God.  And  these  creeds  and  articles  and 
orthodoxies  are  not  proclamations  but  curtains, 
they  are  a  darkening  and  confusion  of  what  should 
be  crystal  clear.  What  compensatory  good  can  a 
priest  pretend  to  do  when  his  primary  business  is 
the  truth  and  his  method  a  lie?  The  oaths  and 
incidental  conformities  of  men  who  wish  to  serve 
God  in  the  state  are  on  a  different  footing  alto- 
gether from  the  falsehood  and  mischief  of  one  who 
knows  the  true  God  and  yet  recites  to  a  trustful 
congregation,  foists  upon  a  trustful  congregation, 


130  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

a  misleading  and  ill-phrased  Levantine  creed. 
Such  is  the  line  of  thought  which  will  impose  the 
renunciation  of  his  temporalities  and  a  complete 
cessation  of  services  upon  every  ordained  priest 
and  minister  as  his  first  act  of  faith.  Once  that  he 
has  truly  realised  God,  it  becomes  impossible  for 
him  ever  to  repeat  his  creed  again.  His  course 
seems  plain  and  clear.  It  becomes  him  to  stand 
up  before  the  flock  he  has  led  in  error,  and  to  pro- 
claim the  being  and  nature  of  the  one  true  God. 
He  must  be  explicit  to  the  utmost  of  his  powers. 
Then  he  may  await  his  expulsion.  It  may  be 
doubted  whether  it  is  sufficient  for  him  to  go  away 
silently,  making  false  excuses,  or  none  at  all  for  his 
retreat.  He  has  to  atone  for  the  implicit  acquies- 
cences  of  his  conforming  years. 

§  10    The  Universalism  of  God 
Are  any  sorts  of  people  shut  off  as  if  by  inherent 
necessity  from  God? 

This  is,  so  to  speak,  one  of  the  standing  questions 
of  theology;  it  reappears  with  slight  changes  of 
form  at  every  period  of  religious  interest,  it  is  for 
example  the  chief  issue  between  the  Arminian  and 
the  Calvinist.  From  its  very  opening  proposition 
modern  religion  sweeps  past  and  far  ahead  of  the 


THE  INVISIBLE  KING  131 

old  Arminian  teachings  of  Wesleyans  and  Metho- 
dists, in  its  insistence  upon  the  entirely  finite  na- 
ture of  God.  Arminians  seem  merely  to  have  in- 
sisted that  God  has  conditioned  himself,  and  by  his 
own  free  act  left  men  free  to  accept  or  reject  sal- 
vation. To  the  realist  type  of  mind  —  here  as  al- 
ways I  use  "  realist "  in  its  proper  sense  as  the 
opposite  of  nominalist  —  to  the  old-fashioned,  over- 
exact  and  over-accentuating  type  of  mind,  such 
ways  of  thinking  seem  vague  and  unsatisfying. 
Just  as  it  distresses  the  more  downright  kind  of 
intelligence  with  a  feeling  of  disloyalty  to  admit 
that  God  is  not  Almighty,  so  it  troubles  the  same 
sort  of  intelligence  to  hear  that  there  is  no  clear 
line  to  be  drawn  between  the  saved  and  the  lost. 
Realists  like  an  exclusive  flavour  in  their  faith. 
Moreover,  it  is  a  natural  weakness  of  humanity  to 
be  forced  into  extreme  positions  by  argument.  It 
is  probable,  as  I  have  already  suggested,  that  the 
absolute  attributes  of  God  were  forced  upon  Chris- 
tianity under  the  stresses  of  propaganda,  and  it  is 
probable  that  the  theory  of  a  super-human  ob- 
stinancy  beyond  salvation  arose  out  of  the  irrita- 
tions natural  to  theological  debate.  It  is  but  a 
step  from  the  realisation  that  there  are  people  ab- 
solutely unable  or  absolutely  unwilling  to  see  God 


132  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

as  we  see  him,  to  the  conviction  that  they  are  there- 
fore shut  off  from  God  by  an  invincible  soul  blind- 
ness. 

It  is  very  easy  to  believe  that  other  people  are 
essentially  damned. 

Beyond  the  little  world  of  our  sympathies  and 
comprehension  there  are  those  who  seem  inacces- 
sible to  God  by  any  means  within  our  experience. 
They  are  people  answering  to  the  "  hard-hearted," 
to  the  "  stiff-necked  generation "  of  the  Hebrew 
prophets.  They  betray  and  even  confess  to  stand- 
ards that  seem  hopelessly  base  to  us.  They  show 
themselves  incapable  of  any  disinterested  enthusi- 
asm for  beauty  or  truth  or  goodness.  They  are 
altogether  remote  from  intelligent  sacrifice.  To 
every  test  they  betray  vileness  of  texture ;  they  are 
mean,  cold,  wicked.  There  are  people  who  seem 
to  cheat  with  a  private  self-approval,  who  are  ever 
ready  to  do  harsh  and  cruel  things,  whose  use  for 
social  feeling  is  the  malignant  boycott,  and  for 
prosperity,  monopolisation  and  humiliating  dis- 
play; who  seize  upon  religion  and  turn  it  into  per- 
secution, and  upon  beauty  to  torment  it  on  the 
altars  of  some  joyless  vice.  We  cannot  do  with 
such  souls ;  we  have  no  use  for  them,  and  it  is  very 


THE  INVISIBLE  KING  133 

easy  indeed  to  step  from  that  persuasion  to  the 
belief  that  God  has  no  use  for  them. 

And  besides  these  base  people  there  are  the  stu- 
pid people  and  the  people  with  minds  so  poor  in 
texture  that  they  cannot  even  grasp  the  few  broad 
and  simple  ideas  that  seem  necessary  to  the  salva- 
tion we  experience,  who  lapse  helplessly  into  fetish- 
istic  and  fearful  conceptions  of  God,  and  are  ap- 
parently quite  incapable  of  distinguishing  between 
what  is  practically  and  what  is  spiritually  good. 

It  is  an  easy  thing  to  conclude  that  the  only  way 
to  God  is  our  way  to  God,  that  he  is  the  privilege 
of  a  finer  and  better  sort  to  which  we  of  course 
belong;  that  he  is  no  more  the  God  of  the  card- 
sharper  or  the  pickpocket  or  the  "  smart "  woman 
or  the  loan-monger  or  the  village  oaf  than  he  is 
of  the  swine  in  the  sty.  But  are  we  justified  in 
thus  limiting  God  to  the  measure  of  our  moral  and 
intellectual  understandings?  Because  some  people 
seem  to  me  steadfastly  and  consistently  base  or 
hopelessly  and  incurably  dull  and  confused,  does 
it  follow  that  there  are  not  phases,  albeit  I  have 
never  chanced  to  see  them,  of  exaltation  in  the  one 
case  and  illumination  in  the  other?  And  may  I 
not  be  a  little  restricting  my  perception  of  Good? 


134  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

While  I  have  been  ready  enough  to  pronounce  this 
or  that  person  as  being,  so  far  as  I  was  concerned, 
thoroughly  damnable  or  utterly  dull,  I  find  a  curi- 
ous reluctance  to  admit  the  general  proposition 
which  is  necessary  for  these  instances.  It  is  pos- 
sible that  the  difference  between  Arminian  and  Cal- 
vinist  is  a  difference  of  essential  intellectual  tem- 
perament rather  than  of  theoretical  conviction,  I 
am  temperamentally  Arminian  as  I  am  tempera- 
mentally Nominalist.  I  feel  that  it  must  be  in  the 
nature  of  God  to  attempt  all  souls.  There  must  be 
accessibilities  I  can  only  suspect,  and  accessibilities 
of  which  I  know  nothing. 

Yet  here  is  a  consideration  pointing  rather  the 
other  way.  If  you  think,  as  you  must  think,  that 
you  yourself  can  be  lost  to  God  and  damned,  then 
I  cannot  see  how  you  can  avoid  thinking  that  other 
people  can  be  damned.  But  that  is  not  to  believe 
that  there  are  people  damned  at  the  outset  by  their 
moral  and  intellectual  insufficiency;  that  is  not  to 
make  out  that  there  is  a  class  of  essential  and  in- 
curable spiritual  defectives.  The  religious  life  pre- 
ceded clear  religious  understanding  and  extends 
far  beyond  its  range. 

In  my  own  case  I  perceive  that  in  spite  of  the 
value  I  attach  to  true  belief,  the  reality  of  religion 


THE  INVISIBLE  KING  135 

is  not  an  intellectual  thing.  The  essential  religious 
fact  is  in  another  than  the  mental  sphere.  I  am 
passionately  anxious  to  have  the  idea  of  God  clear 
in  my  own  mind,  and  to  make  my  beliefs  plain  and 
clear  to  other  people,  and  particularly  to  other  peo- 
ple who  may  seem  to  be  feeling  with  me ;  I  do  per- 
ceive that  error  is  evil  if  only  because  a  faith  based 
on  confused  conceptions  and  partial  understand- 
ings may  suffer  irreparable  injury  through  the  col- 
lapse of  its  substratum  of  ideas.  I  doubt  if  faith 
can  be  complete  and  enduring  if  it  is  not  secured  by 
the  definite  knowledge  of  the  true  God.  Yet  I  have 
also  to  admit  that  I  find  the  form  of  my  own  re- 
ligious emotion  paralleled  by  people  with  whom  I 
have  no  intellectual  sympathy  and  no  agreement  in 
phrase  or  formula  at  all. 

There  is  for  example  this  practical  identity  of 
religious  feeling  and  this  discrepancy  of  interpre- 
tation between  such  an  inquirer  as  myself  and  a 
convert  of  the  Salvation  Army.  Here,  clothing 
itself  in  phrases  and  images  of  barbaric  sacrifice, 
of  slaughtered  lambs  and  fountains  of  precious 
blood,  a  most  repulsive  and  incomprehensible  idiom 
to  me,  and  expressing  itself  by  shouts,  clangour, 
trumpeting,  gesticulations,  and  rhythmic  pacings 
that  stun  and  dismay  mj  nerves,  I  find,  the  same 


136  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

object  sought,  release  from  self,  and  the  same  end, 
the  end  of  identification  with  the  immortal,  suc- 
cessfully if  perhaps  rather  insecurely  achieved.  I 
see  God  indubitably  present  in  these  excitements, 
and  I  see  personalities  I  could  easily  have  mis- 
judged as  too  base  or  too  dense  for  spiritual  un- 
derstandings, lit  by  the  manifest  reflection  of  divin- 
ity. One  may  be  led  into  the  absurdest  under-es- 
timates  of  religious  possibilities  if  one  estimates 
people  only  coldly  and  in  the  light  of  everyday  life. 
There  is  a  sub-intellectual  religious  life  which,  very 
conceivably,  when  its  utmost  range  can  be  exam- 
ined, excludes  nothing  human  from  religious  co- 
operation, which  will  use  any  words  to  its  tune, 
which  takes  its  phrasing  ready-made  from  the  world 
about  it,  as  it  takes  the  street  for  its  temple,  and 
yet  which  may  be  at  its  inner  point  in  the  direct- 
est  contact  with  God.  Religion  may  suffer  from 
aphasia  and  still  be  religion ;  it  may  utter  mislead- 
ing or  nonsensical  words  and  yet  intend  and  con- 
vey the  truth.  The  methods  of  the  Salvation  Army 
are  older  than  doctrinal  Christianity,  and  may  long 
survive  it.  Men  and  women  may  still  chant  of 
Beulah  Land  and  cry  out  in  the  ecstasy  of  salva- 
tion; the  tambourine,  that  modern  revival  of  the 
thrilling  Alexandrine  sistrum,  may  still  stir  dull 


THE  INVISIBLE  KING  137 

nerves  to  a  first  apprehension  of  powers  and  a  call 
beyond  the  immediate  material  compulsion  of  life, 
when  the  creeds  of  Christianity  are  as  dead  as  the 
lore  of  the  Druids. 

The  emancipation  of  mankind  from  obsolete  the- 
ories and  formularies  may  be  accompanied  by  great 
tides  of  moral  and  emotional  release  among  types 
and  strata  that  by  the  standards  of  a  trained  and 
explicit  intellectual,  may  seem  spiritually  hopeless. 
It  is  not  necessary  to  imagine  the  whole  w^orld  crit- 
ical and  lucid  in  order  to  imagine  the  whole  world 
unified  in  religious  sentiment,  comprehending  the 
same  phrases  and  coming  together  regardless  of 
class  and  race  and  quality,  in  the  worship  and 
service  of  the  true  God.  The  coming  kingship  of 
God  if  it  is  to  be  more  than  hieratic  tyranny  must 
have  this  universality  of  appeal.  As  the  head 
grows  clear  the  body  will  turn  in  the  right  direc- 
tion. To  the  mass  of  men  modern  religion  says, 
"  This  is  the  God  it  has  always  been  in  your  nature 
to  apprehend." 

§  11  God  and  the  Love  and  Status  of  Women 
Now  that  we  are  discussing  the  general  question 
of  individual  conduct,  it  will  be  convenient  to  take 
up  again  and  restate  in  that  relationship,  propo- 


138  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

sitions  alreadj'  made  very  plainly  in  the  second  and 
third  chapters.  Here  there  are  several  excellent 
reasons  for  a  certain  amount  of  deliberate  repeti- 
tion. .  .  . 

All  the  mystical  relations  of  chastity,  virginity, 
and  the  like  with  religion,  those  questions  of 
physical  status  that  play  so  large  a  part  in  most 
contemporary  religions,  have  disappeared  from 
modern  faith.  Let  us  be  as  clear  as  possible  upon 
this.  God  is  concerned  by  the  health  and  fitness 
and  vigour  of  his  servants ;  we  owe  him  our  best  and 
utmost;  but  he  has  no  special  concern  and  no  spe- 
cial preferences  or  commandments  regarding  sex- 
ual things. 

Christ,  it  is  manifest,  was  of  the  modern  faith 
in  these  matters,  he  welcomed  the  Magdalen,  neither 
would  he  condemn  the  woman  taken  in  adultery. 
Manifestly  corruption  and  disease  were  not  to  stand 
between  him  and  those  who  sought  God  in  him. 
But  the  Christianity  of  the  creeds,  in  this  as  in 
so  many  respects,  does  not  rise  to  the  level  of  its 
founder,  and  it  is  as  necessary  to  repeat  to-day  as 
though  the  name  of  Christ  had  not  been  ascendant 
for  nineteen  centuries,  that  sex  is  a  secondary  thing 
to  religion,  and  sexual  status  of  no  account  in  the 
presence  of  God.     It  follows  quite  logically  that 


THE  INVISIBLE  KING  139 

God  does  not  discriminate  between  man  and  woman 
in  any  essential  things.  We  leave  our  individual- 
ity behind  us  when  we  come  into  the  presence  of 
God.  Sex  is  not  disavowed  but  forgotten.  Just 
as  one's  last  meal  is  forgotten  —  which  also  is  a 
difference  between  the  religious  moment  of  modern 
faith  and  certain  Christian  sacraments.  You  are 
a  believer  and  God  is  at  hand  to  you ;  heed  not  your 
state;  reach  out  to  him  and  he  is  there.  In  the 
moment  of  religion  you  are  human ;  it  matters  not 
what  else  you  are,  male  or  female,  clean  or  unclean, 
Hebrew  or  Gentile,  bond  or  free.  It  is  after  the 
moment  of  religion  that  we  become  concerned  about 
our  state  and  the  manner  in  which  we  use  ourselves. 
We  have  to  follow  our  reason  as  our  sole  guide 
in  our  individual  treatment  of  all  such  things  as 
food  and  health  and  sex.  God  is  the  king  of  the 
whole  world,  he  is  the  owner  of  our  souls  and  bodies 
and  all  things.  He  is  not  particularly  concerned 
about  any  aspect,  because  he  is  concerned  about 
every  aspect.  We  have  to  make  the  best  use  of 
ourselves  for  his  kingdom ;  that  is  our  rule  of  life. 
That  rule  means  neither  painful  nor  frantic  ab- 
stinences nor  any  forced  way  of  living.  Purity, 
cleanliness,  health,  none  of  these  things  are  for 
themselves,  they  are  for  use;  none  are  magic,  all 


140  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

are  means.  The  sword  must  be  sharp  and  clean. 
That  does  not  mean  that  we  are  perpetually  to 
sharpen  and  clean  it  —  which  would  weaken  and 
waste  the  blade.  The  sword  must  neither  be  drawn 
constantly  nor  always  rusting  in  its  sheath.  Those 
who  have  had  the  wits  and  soul  to  come  to  God, 
will  have  the  wits  and  soul  to  find  out  and  know 
what  is  waste,  what  is  vanity,  what  is  the  happiness 
that  begets  strength  of  body  and  spirit,  what  is 
error,  where  vice  begins,  and  to  avoid  and  repent 
and  recoil  from  all  those  things  that  degrade. 
These  are  matters  not  of  the  rule  of  life  but  of  the 
application  of  life.  They  must  neither  be  neglected 
nor  made  disproportionally  important. 

To  the  believer,  relationship  with  God  is  the  su- 
preme relationship.  It  is  difficult  to  imagine  how 
the  association  of  lovers  and  friends  can  be  very 
fine  and  close  and  good  unless  the  two  who  love  are 
each  also  linked  to  God,  so  that  through  their 
moods  and  fluctuations  and  the  changes  of  years 
they  can  be  held  steadfast  by  his  undying  steadfast- 
ness. But  it  has  been  felt  by  many  deep-feeling 
people  that  there  is  so  much  kindred  between  the 
love  and  trust  of  husband  and  wife  and  the  feeling 
we  have  for  God,  that  it  is  reasonable  to  consider 
the  former  also  as  a  sacred  thing.     They  do  so 


THE  INVISIBLE  KING  Ul 

value  that  close  love  of  mated  man  and  woman, 
they  are  so  intent  upon  its  permanence  and  com- 
pleteness and  to  lift  the  dear  relationship  out  of 
the  ruck  of  casual  and  transitory  things,  that  they 
want  to  bring  it,  as  it  were,  into  the  very  presence 
and  assent  of  God.  There  are  many  who  dream  and 
desire  that  they  are  as  deeply  and  completely  mated 
as  this,  many  more  who  would  fain  be  so,  and  some 
who  are.  And  from  this  comes  the  earnest  desire 
to  make  marriage  sacramental  and  the  attempt  to 
impose  upon  all  the  world  the  outward  appearance, 
the  restrictions,  the  pretence  at  least  of  such  a  sac- 
ramental union. 

There  may  be  such  a  quasi-sacramental  union  in 
many  cases,  but  only  after  years  can  one  be  sure  of 
it ;  it  is  not  to  be  brought  about  by  vows  and  prom- 
ises but  by  an  essential  kindred  and  cleaving  of 
body  and  spirit ;  and  it  concerns  only  the  two  who 
can  dare  to  say  they  have  it,  and  God.  And  the 
divine  thing  in  marriage,  the  thing  that  is  most  like 
the  love  of  God,  is,  even  then,  not  the  relationship 
of  the  man  and  woman  as  man  and  woman  but  the 
comradeship  and  trust  and  mutual  help  and  pity 
that  joins  them.  No  doubt  that  from  the  mutual 
necessities  of  bodily  love  and  the  common  adven- 
ture, the  necessary  honesties  and  helps  of  a  joint 


142  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

life,  there  springs  the  stoutest,  nearest,  most  en- 
during and  best  of  human  companionship ;  perhaps 
only  upon  that  root  can  the  best  of  mortal  com- 
radeship be  got;  but  it  does  not  follow  that  the 
mere  ordinary  coming  together  and  pairing  off  of 
men  and  women  is  in  itself  divine  or  sacramental 
or  anj^thing  of  the  sort.  Being  in  love  is  a  condi- 
tion that  may  have  its  moments  of  sublime  exalta- 
tion, but  it  is  for  the  most  part  an  experience  far 
down  the  scale  below  divine  experience ;  it  is  often 
love  only  in  so  far  as  it  shares  the  name  with  better 
things ;  it  is  greed,  it  is  admiration,  it  is  desire,  it 
is  the  itch  for  excitement,  it  is  the  instinct  for  com- 
petition, it  is  lust,  it  is  curiosity,  it  is  adventure,  it 
is  jealousy,  it  is  hate.  On  a  hundred  scores  '  lov- 
ers '  meet  and  part.  Thereby  some  few  find  true 
love  and  the  spirit  of  God  in  themselves  or  others. 

Lovers  may  love  God  in  one  another;  I  do  not 
deny  it.  That  is  no  reason  why  the  imitation  and 
outward  form  of  this  great  happiness  should  be 
made  an  obligation  upon  all  men  and  women  who 
are  attracted  by  one  another,  nor  why  it  should  be 
woven  into  the  essentials  of  religion.  For  women 
much  more  than  for  men  is  this  confusion  danger- 
ous, lest  a  personal  love  should  shape  and  dominate 
their  lives  instead  of  God.     "He  for  God  only; 


THE  INVISIBLE  KING  143 

she  for  God  in  him,"  phrases  the  idea  of  Milton  and 
of  ancient  Islam;  it  is  the  formula  of  sexual  in- 
fatuation, a  formula  quite  easily  inverted,  as  the 
end  of  Goethe's  Faust  ("The  woman  soul  leadeth 
us  upward  and  on  " )  may  witness.  The  whole  drift 
of  modern  religious  feeling  is  against  this  exag- 
geration of  sexual  feeling,  these  moods  of  sexual 
slavishness,  in  spiritual  things.  Between  the 
healthy  love  of  ordinary  mortal  lovers  in  love  and 
the  love  of  God,  there  is  an  essential  contrast  and 
opposition  in  this,  that  preference,  exclusiveness, 
and  jealousy  seem  to  be  in  the  very  nature  of  the 
former  and  are  absolutely  incompatible  with  the 
latter.  The  former  is  the  intensest  realisation  of 
which  our  individualities  are  capable ;  the  latter  is 
the  way  of  escape  from  the  limitations  of  individu- 
ality. It  may  be  true  that  a  few  men  and  more 
women  do  achieve  the  completest  unselfishness  and 
self-abandonment  in  earthly  love.  So  the  poets 
and  romancers  tell  us.  If  so,  it  is  that  by  an  imag- 
inative perversion  they  have  given  to  some  attract- 
ive person  a  worship  that  should  be  reserved  for 
God  and  a  devotion  that  is  normally  evoked  only 
by  little  children  in  their  mother's  heart.  It  is  not 
the  way  between  most  of  the  men  and  women  one 
meets  in  this  world. 


144  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

But  between  God  and  the  believer  there  is  no 
other  way,  there  is  nothing  else,  but  self -surrender 
and  the  ending  of  self. 


CHAPTER  THE  SIXTH 

MODERN  IDEAS  OF  SIN  AND  DAMNATION 

§  1  The  Biological  Equivalent  of  Sin 
If  the  reader  who  is  unfamiliar  with  scientific 
things  will  obtain  and  read  Metchnikoff's  "  Nature 
of  Man,"  he  will  find  there  an  interesting  summary 
of  the  biological  facts  that  bear  upon  and  destroy 
the  delusion  that  there  is  such  a  thing  as  individual 
perfection,  that  there  is  even  ideal  perfection  for 
humanity.  With  an  abundance  of  convincing  in- 
stances Professor  Metchnikoff  demonstrates  that 
life  is  a  system  of  "  disharmonies,"  capable  of  no 
perfect  way,  that  there  is  no  "  perfect "  dieting,  no 
"  perfect "  sexual  life,  no  "  perfect "  happiness,  no 
"  perfect  "  conduct.  He  releases  one  from  the  arbi- 
trary but  all  too  easy  assumption  that  there  is  even 
an  ideal  "  perfection  "  in  organic  life.  He  sweeps 
out  of  the  mind  with  all  the  confidence  and  convic- 
tion of  a  physiological  specialist,  any  idea  that 
there  is  a  perfect  man  or  a  conceivable  perfect  man. 
It  is  in  the  nature  of  every  man  to  fall  short  at 

145 


146  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

e\evy  point  from  perfection.  From  the  biological 
point  of  view  we  are  as  individuals  a  series  of  in- 
voluntary "  tries "  on  the  part  of  an  imperfect 
species  towards  an  unknown  end. 

Our  spiritual  nature  follows  our  bodily  as  a 
glove  follows  a  hand.  We  are  disharmonious  be- 
ings and  salvation  no  more  makes  an  end  to  the 
defects  of  our  souls  than  it  makes  an  end  to  the 
decay  of  our  teeth  or  to  those  vestigial  structures 
of  our  body  that  endanger  our  physical  welfare. 
Salvation  leaves  us  still  disharmonious,  and  adds 
not  an  inch  to  our  spiritual  and  moral  stature. 

§  2  What  is  Damnation? 
Let  us  now  take  up  the  question  of  what  is  Sin? 
and  what  we  mean  by  the  term  "  damnation,"  in 
the  light  of  this  view  of  human  reality.  Most  of 
the  great  world  religions  are  as  clear  as  Professor 
Metchnikoff  that  life  in  the  world  is  a  tangle  of 
disharmonies,  and  in  most  cases  they  supply  a  more 
or  less  myth-like  explanation,  they  declare  that  evil 
is  one  side  of  the  conflict  between  Ahriman  and 
Ormazd,  or  that  it  is  the  punishment  of  an  act  of 
disobedience,  of  the  fall  of  man  and  world  alike 
from  a  state  of  harmony.  Their  case,  like  his,  is 
that  this  world  is  damned. 


MODERN  IDEAS  OF  SIN  147 

We  do  not  find  the  belief  that  superposed  upon 
the  miseries  of  this  world  there  are  the  still  bitterer 
miseries  of  punishments  after  death,  so  nearly  uni- 
versal. The  endless  punishments  of  hell  appear 
to  be  an  exploit  of  theory;  they  have  a  superadded 
appearance  even  in  the  Christian  system ;  the  same 
common  tendency  to  superlatives  and  absolutes  that 
makes  men  ashamed  to  admit  that  God  is  finite, 
makes  them  seek  to  enhance  the  merits  of  their* 
Saviour  by  the  device  of  everlasting  fire.  Conquest 
over  the  sorrow  of  life  and  the  fear  of  death  do  not 
seem  to  them  sufficient  for  Christ's  glory. 

Now  the  turning  round  of  the  modern  mind  from 
a  conception  of  the  universe  as  something  derived 
deductively  from  the  past  to  a  conception  of  it  as 
something  gathering  itself  adventurously  towards 
the  future,  involves  a  release  from  the  supposed 
necessity  to  tell  a  story  and  explain  why.  Instead 
comes  the  inquiry,  "To  what  end?"  We  can  say 
without  mental  discomfort,  these  disharmonies  are 
here,  this  damnation  is  here  —  inexplicably.  We 
can,  without  any  distressful  inquiry  into  ultimate 
origins,  bring  our  minds  to  the  conception  of  a 
spontaneous  and  developing  God  arising  out  of 
those  stresses  in  our  hearts  and  in  the  universe, 
and  arising  to  overcome  them.     Salvation  for  the 


148  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

individual  is  escape  from  the  individual  distress 
at  disharmony  and  the  individual  defeat  by  death, 
into  the  Kingdom  of  God.  And  damnation  can  be 
nothing  more  and  nothing  less  than  the  failure  or 
inability  or  disinclination  to  make  that  escape. 

Something  of  that  idea  of  damnation  as  a  lack 
of  the  will  for  salvation  has  crept  at  a  number  of 
points  into  contemporary  religious  thought.  It 
was  the  fine  fancy  of  Swedenborg  that  the  damned 
go  to  their  own  hells  of  their  own  accord.  It  un- 
derlies a  queer  poem,  "  Simpson,"  by  that  interest- 
ing essayist  upon  modern  Christianity,  Mr.  Glutton 
Brock,  which  I  have  recently  read.  Simpson  dies 
and  goes  to  hell  —  it  is  rather  like  the  Cromwell 
Eoad  —  and  approves  of  it  very  highly,  and  then 
and  then  only  is  he  completely  damned.  Not  to  re- 
alise that  one  can  be  damned  is  certainly  to  be 
damned ;  such  is  Mr.  Brock's  idea.  It  is  his  defini- 
tion of  damnation.  Satisfaction  with  existing 
things  is  damnation.  It  is  surrender  to  limitation ; 
it  is  acquiescence  in  "  disharmony  " ;  it  is  making 
peace  with  that  enemy  against  whom  God  fights 
for  ever. 

(But  whether  there  are  indeed  Simpsons  who 
acquiesce  always  and  for  ever  remains  for  me,  as 


MODERN  IDEAS  OF  ^IN  149 

I  have  already  confessed  in  the  previous  chapter,  a 
quite  open  question.  My  Arminian  temperament 
turns  me  from  the  Calvinistic  conclusion  of  Mr. 
Brock's  satire.) 

§  3  Sin  is  not  Damnation 
Now  the  question  of  sin  will  hardly  concern  those 
damned  and  lost  by  nature,  if  such  there  be.  Sin 
is  not  the  same  thing  as  damnation,  as  we  have 
just  defined  damnation.  Damnation  is  a  state,  but 
sin  is  an  incident.  One  is  an  essential  and  the 
other  an  incidental  separation  from  God.  It  is  pos- 
sible to  sin  without  being  damned;  and  to  be 
damned  is  to  be  in  a  state  when  sin  scarcely  mat- 
ters, like  ink  upon  a  blackamoor.  You  cannot  have 
questions  Of  more  or  less  among  absolute  things. 

It  is  the  amazing  and  distressful  discovery  of 
every  believer  so  soon  as  the  first  exaltation  of  be- 
lief is  past,  that  one  does  not  remain  always  in 
touch  with  God.  At  first  it  seems  incredible  that 
one  should  ever  have  any  motive  again  that  is  not 
also  God's  motive.  Then  one  finds  oneself  caught 
unawares  by  a  base  impulse.  We  discover  that 
discontinuousness  of  our  apparently  homogeneous 
selves,  the  unincorporated  and  warring  elements 


150  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

that  seemed  at  first  altogether  absent  from  the  syn- 
thesis of  conversion.  We  are  tripped  up  by  forget- 
fulness,  by  distraction,  by  old  habits,  by  tricks  of 
appearance.  There  come  dull  patches  of  exist- 
ence; those  mysterious  obliterations  of  one's  finer 
sense  that  are  due  at  times  to  the  little  minor  poi- 
sons one  eats  or  drinks,  to  phases  of  fatigue,  ill- 
health  and  bodily  disorder,  or  one  is  betrayed  by 
some  unanticipated  storm  of  emotion,  brewed  deep 
in  the  animal  being  and  released  by  any  trifling 
accident,  such  as  personal  jealousy  or  lust,  or  one 
is  relaxed  by  contentment  into  vanity.  All  these 
rebel  forces  of  our  ill-coordinated  selves,  all  these 
"  disharmonies,"  of  the  inner  being,  snatch  us  away 
from  our  devotion  to  God's  service,  carry  us  off  to 
follies,  offences,  unkindness,  waste,  and  leave  us 
compromised,  involved,  and  regretful,  perplexed  by 
a  hundred  difficulties  we  have  put  in  our  own  way 
back  to  God. 

This  is  the  personal  problem  of  Sin.  Here  prayer 
avails;  here  God  can  help  us.  From  God  comes 
the  strength  to  repent  and  make  such  reparation 
as  we  can,  to  begin  the  battle  again  further  back 
and  lower  down.  From  God  comes  the  power  to 
anticipate  the  struggle  with  one's  rebel  self,  and  to 
resist  and  prevail  over  it. 


MODERN  IDEAS  OF  SIN  151 

§  4    The  Sins  of  the  Insane 
An  extreme  case  is  very  serviceable  in  such  a  dis- 
cussion as  this. 

It  happens  that  the  author  carries  on  a  corre- 
spondence with  several  lunatics  in  asylums.  There 
is  a  considerable  freedom  of  notepaper  in  these  in- 
stitutions; the  outgoing  letters  are  no  doubt  cen- 
sored or  selected  in  some  way,  but  a  proportion  at 
any  rate  are  allowed  to  go  out  to  their  addresses. 
As  a  journalist  who  signs  his  articles  and  as  the 
author  of  various  books  of  fiction,  as  a  frequent 
name,  that  is,  to  any  one  much  forced  back  upon 
reading,  the  writer  is  particularly  accessible  to  this 
type  of  correspondent.  The  letters  come,  some 
manifesting  a  hopeless  disorder  that  permits  of  no 
reply,  but  some  being  the  expression  of  minds  over- 
laid not  at  all  offensively  by  a  web  of  fantasy,  and 
some  (and  these  are  the  more  touching  ones  and 
the  ones  that  most  concern  us  now)  as  sanely  con- 
ceived and  expressed  as  any  letters  could  be.  They 
are  written  by  people  living  lives  very  like  the 
lives  of  us  who  are  called  "  sane,"  except  that  they 
lift  to  a  higher  excitement  and  fall  to  a  lower  de- 
pression, and  that  these  extremer  phases  of  mania 
or  melancholia  slip  the  leash  of  mental  consistency 


152  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

altogether  and  take  abnormal  forms.  They  tap 
deep  founts  of  impulse,  such  as  we  of  the  safer  ways 
of  mediocrity  do  but  glimpse  under  the  influence 
of  drugs,  or  in  dreams  and  rare  moments  of  con- 
trollable extravagance.  Then  the  insane  become 
"  glorious,"  or  they  become  murderous,  or  they  be- 
come suicidal.  All  these  letter-writers  in  confine- 
ment have  convinced  their  fellow-creatures  by  some 
extravagance  that  they  are  a  danger  to  themselves 
or  others. 

The  letters  that  come  from  such  types  written 
during  their  sane  intervals,  are  entirely  sane. 
Some,  who  are  probably  unaware  —  I  think  they 
should  know  —  of  the  offences  or  possibilities  that 
justify  their  incarceration,  write  with  a  certain  re- 
sentment at  their  position;  others  are  entirely  ac- 
quiescent, but  one  or  two  complain  of  the  neglect 
of  friends  and  relations.  But  all  are  as  manifestly 
capable  of  religion  and  of  the  religious  life  as  any 
other  intelligent  persons  during  the  lucid  inter- 
ludes that  make  up  nine-tenths  perhaps  of  their 
lives.  .  .  .  Suppose  now  one  of  these  cases,  and  sup- 
pose that  the  infirmity  takes  the  form  of  some  cruel, 
disgusting,  or  destructive  disposition  that  may  be- 
come at  times  overwhelming,  and  you  have  our  uni- 
versal trouble  with  sinful  tendency,  as  it  were  mag- 


MODERN  IDEAS  OF  SIN  153 

nifled  for  examination.  It  is  clear  that  the  mania 
which  defines  his  position  must  be  the  primary  if 
not  the  cardinal  business  in  the  life  of  a  lunatic, 
but  his  problem  with  that  is  different  not  in  kind 
but  merely  in  degree  from  the  problem  of  lusts, 
vanities,  and  weaknesses  in  what  we  call  normal 
lives.  It  is  an  unconquered  tract,  a  great  rebel 
province  in  his  being,  which  refuses  to  serve  God 
and  tries  to  prevent  him  serving  God,  and  suc- 
ceeds at  times  in  wresting  his  capital  out  of  his 
control.  But  his  relationship  to  that  is  the  same 
relationship  as  ours  to  the  backward  and  insubor- 
dinate parishes,  criminal  slums,  and  disorderly 
houses  in  our  own  private  texture. 

It  is  clear  that  the  believer  who  is  a  lunatic  is,  as 
it  were,  only  the  better  part  of  himself.  He  serves 
God  with  this  unconquered  disposition  in  him,  like 
a  man  who,  whatever  else  he  is  and  does,  is  obliged 
to  be  the  keeper  of  an  untrustworthy  and  wicked 
animal.  His  beast  gets  loose.  His  only  resort  is 
to  warn  those  about  him  when  he  feels  that  jang- 
ling or  excitement  of  the  nerves  which  precedes 
its  escapes,  to  limit  its  range,  to  place  weapons 
beyond  its  reach.  And  there  are  plenty  of  human 
beings  very  much  in  his  case,  whose  beasts  have 
never  got  loose  or  have  got  caught  back  before  their 


154  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

essential  insanity  was  apparent.  And  there  are 
those  uncertifiable  lunatics  we  call  men  and  women 
of  "  impulse  "  and  "  strong  passions."  If  perhaps 
they  have  more  self-control  than  the  really  mad, 
yet  it  happens  oftener  with  them  that  the  whole  in- 
telligent being  falls  under  the  dominion  of  evil. 
The  passion  scarcely  less  than  the  obsession  may 
darken  the  whole  moral  sky.  Kepentance  and 
atonement;  nothing  less  will  avail  them  after  the 
storm  has  passed,  and  the  sedulous  preparation  of 
defences  and  palliatives  against  the  return  of  the 
storm. 

This  discussion  of  the  lunatic's  case  gives  us  in- 
deed, usefully  coarse  and  large,  the  lines  for  the 
treatment  of  every  human  weakness  by  the  servants 
of  God.  A  "  weakness,"  just  like  the  lunatic's 
mania,  becomes  a  particular  charge  under  God,  a 
special  duty  for  the  person  it  affects.  He  has  to 
minimise  it,  to  isolate  it,  to  keep  it  out  of  mis- 
chief. If  he  can  he  must  adopt  preventive  meas- 
ures. .  .  . 

These  passions  and  weaknesses  that  get  control 
of  us  hamper  our  usefulness  to  God,  they  are  an 
incessant  anxiety  and  distress  to  us,  they  wound 
our  self-respect  and  make  us  incomprehensible  to 
many  who  would  trust  us,  they  discredit  the  faith 


MODERN  IDEAS  OF  SIN  155 

we  profess.  If  they  break  through  and  break 
through  again  it  is  natural  and  proper  that  men 
and  women  should  cease  to  believe  in  our  faith, 
cease  to  work  with  us  or  to  meet  us  frankly.  .  .  . 
Our  sins  do  everything  evil  to  us  and  through  us 
except  separate  us  from  God. 

Yet  let  there  be  no  mistake  about  one  thing. 
Here  prayer  is  a  power.  Here  God  can  indeed 
work  miracles.  A  man  with  the  light  of  God  in 
his  heart  can  defeat  vicious  habits,  rise  again  com- 
bative and  undaunted  after  a  hundred  falls,  escape 
from  the  grip  of  lusts  and  revenges,  make  head 
against  despair,  thrust  back  the  very  onset  of  mad- 
ness. He  is  still  the  same  man  he  was  before  he 
came  to  God,  still  w^ith  his  libidinous,  vindictive, 
boastful,  or  indolent  vein ;  but  now  his  will  to  pre- 
vail over  those  qualities  can  refer  to  an  exterior 
standard  and  an  external  interest,  he  can  draw 
upon  a  strength,  almost  boundless,  beyond  his  own. 

§  5  Believe,  and  you  are  Saved 
But  be  a  sin  great  or  small,  it  cannot  damn  a 
man  once  he  has  found  God.  You  may  kill  and 
hang  for  it,  you  may  rob  or  rape ;  the  moment  you 
truly  repent  and  set  yourself  to  such  atonement 
and  reparation  as  is  possible  there  remains  no  bar- 


156  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

rier  between  you  and  God.  Directly  you  cease  to 
hide  or  deny  or  escape,  and  turn  manfully  towards 
the  consequences  and  the  setting  of  things  right, 
you  take  hold  again  of  the  hand  of  God.  Though 
you  sin  seventy  times  seven  times,  God  will  still 
forgive  the  poor  rest  of  you.  Nothing  but  utter 
blindness  of  the  spirit  can  shut  a  man  off  from  God. 

There  is  nothing  one  can  suffer,  no  situation  so 
unfortunate,  that  it  can  shut  off  one  who  has  the 
thought  of  God,  from  God.  If  you  but  lift  up  your 
head  for  a  moment  out  of  a  stormy  chaos  of  mad- 
ness and  cry  to  him,  God  is  there,  God  will  not 
fail  you.  A  convicted  criminal,  frankly  penitent, 
and  neither  obdurate  nor  abject,  whatever  the  evil 
of  his  3^esterdays,  may  still  die  well  and  bravely  on 
the  gallows  to  the  glory  of  God.  He  may  step 
straight  from  that  death  into  the  immortal  being 
of  God. 

This  persuasion  is  the  very  essence  of  the  re- 
ligion of  the  true  God.  There  is  no  sin,  no  state 
that,  being  regretted  and  repented  of,  can  stand  be- 
tween God  and  man. 


CHAPTER  THE  SEVENTH 

THE  IDEA  OF  A  CHURCH 

§  1  The  World  Dawn 
As  yet  those  who  may  be  counted  as  belonging 
definitely  to  the  new  religion  are  few  and  scattered 
and  unconfessed,  their  realisations  are  still  uncer- 
tain and  incomplete.  But  that  is  no  augury  for 
the  continuance  of  this  state  of  affairs  even  for  the 
next  few  decades.  There  are  many  signs  that  the 
revival  is  coming  very  swiftly,  it  may  be  coming 
as  swiftly  as  the  morning  comes  after  a  tropical 
night.  It  may  seem  at  present  as  though  nothing 
very  much  were  happening,  except  for  the  fact  that 
the  old  familiar  constellations  of  theology  have  be- 
come a  little  pallid  and  lost  something  of  their 
multitude  of  points.  But  nothing  fades  of  itself. 
The  deep  stillness  of  the  late  night  is  broken  by  a 
stirring,  and  the  morning  star  of  creedless  faith, 
the  last  and  brightest  of  the  stars,  the  star  that 
owes  its  light  to  the  coming  sun  is  in  the  sky. 

There  is  a  stirring  and  a  movement.     There  is  a 
stir,  like  the  stir  before  a  breeze.     Men  are  begin- 

157 


158  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

niug  to  speak  of  religion  without  the  bluster  of 
the  Christian  formulae;  they  have  begun  to  speak 
of  God  without  any  reference  to  Omnipresence, 
Omniscience,  Omnipotence.  The  Deists  and  The- 
ists  of  an  older  generation,  be  it  noted,  never  did 
that.  Their  "  Supreme  Being "  repudiated  noth- 
ing. He  was  merely  the  whittled  stump  of  the 
Trinity.  It  is  in  the  last  few  decades  that  the  west- 
ern mind  has  slipped  loose  from  this  absolutist  con- 
ception of  God  that  has  dominated  the  intelligence 
of  Christendom  at  least,  for  many  centuries.  Al- 
most unconsciously  the  new  thought  is  taking  a 
course  that  will  lead  it  far  away  from  the  moor- 
ings of  Omnipotence.  It  is  like  a  ship  that  has 
slipped  its  anchors  and  drifts,  still  sleeping,  under 
the  pale  and  vanishing  stars,  out  to  the  open 
sea.  .  .  . 

§  2    Convergent  Religious  Movements 
In  quite  a  little  while  the  whole  world  may  be 
alive  with  this  renascent  faith. 

For  emancipation  from  the  Trinitarian  formu- 
laries and  from  a  belief  in  an  infinite  God  means 
not  merely  a  great  revivification  of  minds  trained 
under  the  decadence  of  orthodox  Christianity, 
minds  which  have  hitherto  been  hopelessly  embar- 


THE  IDEA  OF  A  CHURCH  159 

rassed  by  the  choice  between  pseudo-Christian  re- 
ligion or  denial,  but  also  it  opens  the  way  towards 
the  completest  understanding  and  sympathy  and 
participation  with  the  kindred  movements  for  re- 
lease and  for  an  intensification  of  the  religious  life, 
that  are  going  on  outside  the  sphere  of  the  Christian 
tradition  and  influence  altogether.  Allusion  has 
already  been  made  to  the  sympathetic  devotional 
poetry  of  Rabindranath  Tagore;  he  stands  for  a 
movement  in  Brahminism  parallel  with  and  assim- 
ilable to  the  worship  of  the  true  God  of  mankind. 

It  is  too  often  supposed  that  the  religious  ten- 
dency of  the  East  is  entirely  towards  other-world- 
ness,  to  a  treatment  of  this  life  as  an  evil  entangle- 
ment and  of  death  as  a  release  and  a  blessing.  It 
is  too  easily  assumed  that  Eastern  teaching  is 
wholly  concerned  with  renunciation,  not  merely  of 
self  but  of  being,  with  the  escape  from  all  effort 
of  any  sort  into  an  exalted  vacuity.  This  is  in- 
deed neither  the  spirit  of  China  nor  of  Islam  nor 
of  the  every-day  life  of  any  people  in  the  world. 
It  is  not  the  spirit  of  the  Sikh  nor  of  these  newer 
developments  of  Hindu  thought.  It  has  never  been 
the  spirit  of  Japan.  To-day  less  than  ever  does 
Asia  seem  disposed  to  give  up  life  and  the  effort 
of  life.     Just  as  readily  as  Europeans,  do  the  Asi- 


160  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

atics  reach  out  their  arms  to  that  fuller  life  we  can 
live,  that  greater  intensity  of  existence,  to  which 
we  can  attain  by  escaping  from  ourselves.  All 
mankind  is  seeking  God.  There  is  not  a  nation 
nor  a  city  in  the  globe  where  men  are  not  being 
urged  at  this  moment  by  the  spirit  of  God  in  them 
towards  the  discovery  of  God.  This  is  not  an  age 
of  despair  but  an  age  of  hope  in  Asia  as  in  all  the 
world  besides. 

Islam  is  undergoing  a  process  of  revision  closely 
parallel  to  that  which  ransacks  Christianity. 
Tradition  and  mediaeval  doctrines  are  being  thrust 
aside  in  a  similar  way.  There  is  much  probing 
into  the  spirit  and  intention  of  the  Founder.  The 
time  is  almost  ripe  for  a  heart-searching  Dialogue 
of  the  Dead,  "  How  we  settled  our  religions  for 
ever  and  ever,"  between,  let  us  say,  Eusebius  of 
Csesarea  and  one  of  Nizam-al-Mulk's  tame  theolo- 
gians. They  would  be  drawn  together  by  the  same 
tribulations;  they  would  be  in  the  closest  sym- 
pathy against  the  temerity  of  the  moderns;  they 
would  have  a  common  courtliness.  The  Quran  is 
but  little  read  by  Europeans;  it  is  ignorantly  sup- 
posed to  contain  many  things  that  it  does  not  con- 
tain ;  there  is  much  confusion  in  people's  minds  be- 
tween its  text  and  the  ancient  Semitic  traditions 


THE  IDEA  OF  A  CHURCH  161 

and  usages  retained  by  its  followers;  in  places  it 
may  seem  formless  and  barbaric;  but  what  it  lias 
chiefly  to  tell  of  is  the  leadership  of  one  individ- 
ualised militant  God  who  claims  the  rule  of  the 
whole  world,  who  favours  neither  rank  nor  race, 
who  would  lead  men  to  righteousness.  It  is  much 
more  free  from  sacramentalism,  from  vestiges  of 
the  ancient  blood  sacrifice,  and  its  associated 
sacerdotalism,  than  Christianity.  The  religion 
that  will  presently  sway  mankind  can  be  reached 
more  easily  from  that  starting-point  than  from 
the  confused  mysteries  of  Trinitarian  theology. 
Islam  was  never  saddled  with  a  creed.  With  the 
very  name  "  Islam  "  (submission  to  God)  there  is 
no  quarrel  for  those  who  hold  the  new  faith.  .  .  . 

All  the  world  over  there  is  this  stirring  in  the 
dry  bones  of  the  old  beliefs.  There  is  scarcely  a  re- 
ligion that  has  not  its  Bahaism,  its  Modernists,  its 
Brahmo  Somaj,  its  "  religion  without  theology," 
its  attempts  to  escape  from  old  forms  and  hamper- 
ing associations  to  that  living  and  world-wide  spir- 
itual reality  upon  which  the  human  mind  almost  in- 
stinctively insists.  .  .  . 

It  is  the  same  God  we  all  seek ;  he  becomes  more 
and  more  plainly  the  same  God. 

So  that  all  this  religious  stir,  which  seems  so 


162  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

multifold  and  incidental  and  disconnected  and  con- 
fused and  entirely  ineffective  to-day,  may  be  and 
most  probably  will  be,  in  quite  a  few  years  a  great 
flood  of  religious  unanimity  pouring  over  and 
changing  all  human  affairs,  sweeping  away  the  old 
priesthoods  and  tabernacles  and  symbols  and 
shrines,  the  last  crumb  of  the  Orphic  victim  and  the 
last  rag  of  the  Serapeum,  and  turning  all  men 
about  into  one  direction,  as  the  ships  and  house- 
boats swing  round  together  in  some  great  river 
with  the  uprush  of  the  tide.  .  .  . 

§  3  Can  there  be  a  True  Church? 
Among  those  who  are  beginning  to  realise  the  dif- 
ferences and  identities  of  the  revived  religion  that 
has  returned  to  them,  certain  questions  of  or- 
ganisation and  assembly  are  being  discussed. 
Every  new  religious  development  is  haunted  by 
the  precedents  of  the  religion  it  replaces,  and  it 
was  only  to  be  expected  that  among  those  who  have 
recovered  their  faith  there  should  be  a  search  for 
apostles  and  disciples,  an  attempt  to  determine 
sources  and  to  form  original  congregations,  espe- 
cially among  people  with  European  traditions. 

These  dispositions  mark  a  relapse  from  under- 
standing.    They   are  imitative.     This  time  there 


THE  IDEA  OF  A  CHURCH  163 

has  been  no  revelation  here  or  there;  there  is  no 
claim  to  a  revelation  but  simply  that  God  has  be- 
come visible.  Men  have  thought  and  sought  until 
insensibly  the  fog  of  obsolete  theology  has  cleared 
away.  There  seems  no  need  therefore  for  special 
teachers  or  a  special  propaganda,  or  any  ritual 
or  observances  that  will  seem  to  insist  upon  differ- 
ences. The  Christian  precedent  of  a  church  is  par- 
ticularly misleading.  The  church  with  its  sacra- 
ments and  its  sacerdotalism,  is  the  disease  of  Chris- 
tianity. Save  for  a  few  doubtful  interpolations 
there  is  no  evidence  that  Christ  tolerated  either 
blood  sacrifices  or  the  mysteries  of  priesthood.  All 
these  antique  grossnesses  were  superadded  after  his 
martyrdom.  He  preached  not  a  cult  but  a  gospel ; 
he  sent  out  not  medicine  men  but  apostles. 

No  doubt  all  who  believe  owe  an  apostolic  service 
to  God.  They  become  naturally  apostolic.  As 
men  perceive  and  realise  God,  each  will  be  disposed 
in  his  own  fashion  to  call  his  neighbour's  attention 
to  what  he  sees.  The  necessary  elements  of  reli- 
gion could  be  written  on  a  post  card;  this  book, 
small  as  it  is,  bulks  large  not  by  what  it  tells  posi- 
tively but  because  it  deals  with  misconceptions. 
We  may  (little  doubt  have  I  that  we  do)  need  spe- 
cial propagandas  and  organisations  to  discuss  er- 


164  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

rors  and  keep  back  the  jungle  of  false  ideas,  to 
maintain  free  sjieech  and  restrain  the  enterprise  of 
the  persecutor,  but  we  do  not  want  a  church  to 
keep  our  faith  for  us.  We  want  our  faith  spread, 
but  for  that  there  is  no  need  for  orthodoxies  and 
controlling  organisations  of  statement.  It  is  for 
each  man  to  follow  his  own  impulse,  and  to  speak 
to  his  like  in  his  own  fashion. 

Whatever  religious  congregations  men  may  form 
henceforth  in  the  name  of  the  true  God  must  be  for 
their  own  sakes  and  not  to  take  charge  of  religion. 

The  history  of  Christianity,  with  its  encrustation 
and  suffocation  in  dogmas  and  usages,  its  dire  per- 
secutions of  the  faithful  by  the  unfaithful,  its  desic- 
cation and  its  unlovely  decay,  its  invasion  by  robes 
and  rites  and  all  the  tricks  and  vices  of  the  Phari- 
sees whom  Christ  detested  and  denounced,  is  full 
of  warning  against  the  dangers  of  a  church.  Or- 
ganisation is  an  excellent  thing  for  the  material 
needs  of  men,  for  the  draining  of  towns,  the  mar- 
shalling of  traffic,  the  collecting  of  eggs,  and  the 
carrying  of  letters,  the  distribution  of  bread,  the 
notification  of  measles,  for  hygiene  and  economics 
and  suchlike  affairs.  The  better  we  organise  such 
things,  tlie  freer  and  better  equipped  we  leave  men's 
minds  for  nobler  purposes,  for  those  adventures 


THE  IDEA  OF  A  CHUECH  165 

and  experiments  towards  God's  purpose  whicli  are 
the  reality  of  life.  But  all  organisations  must  be 
watched,  for  whatever  is  organised  can  be  "  cap- 
tured "  and  misused.  Repentance,  moreover,  is 
the  beginning  and  essential  of  the  religious  life,  and 
organisations  (acting  through  their  secretaries  and 
oflQcials)  never  repent.  God  deals  only  with  the  in- 
dividual for  the  individual's  surrender.  He  takes 
no  cognisance  of  committees. 

Those  who  are  most  alive  to  the  realities  of  liv- 
ing religion  are  most  mistrustful  of  this  congre- 
gating tendency.  To  gather  together  is  to  purchase 
a  benefit  at  the  price  of  a  greater  loss,  to  strengthen 
one's  sense  of  brotherhood  by  excluding  the  major- 
ity of  mankind.  Before  you  know  where  you  are 
you  will  have  exchanged  the  spirit  of  God  for  esprit 
de  corps.  You  will  have  reinvented  the  syrrihol; 
you  will  have  begun  to  keep  anniversaries  and  es- 
tablish sacramental  ceremonies.  The  disposition 
to  form  cliques  and  exclude  and  conspire  against 
unlike  people  is  all  too  strong  in  humanity,  to  per- 
mit of  its  formal  encouragement.  Even  such  or- 
ganisation as  is  implied  by  a  creed  is  to  be  avoided, 
for  all  living  faith  coagulates  as  you  phrase  it.  In 
this  book  I  have  not  given  so  much  as  a  definite 
name  to  the  faith  of  the  true  God.     Organisation 


166  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

for  worship  and  collective  exaltation  also,  it  may 
be  urged,  is  of  little  manifest  good.  You  cannot  ap- 
point beforehand  a  time  and  place  for  God  to  irradi- 
ate your  soul. 

All  these  are  very  valid  objections  to  the  church- 
forming  disposition. 

§  4    Organisations  under  God 
Yet  still  this  leaves  many  dissatisfied.     They  want 
to  shout  out  about  God.     They  want  to  share  this 
great  thing  with  all  mankind. 

Why  should  they  not  shout  and  share? 

Let  them  express  all  that  they  desire  to  express 
in  their  own  fashion  by  themselves  or  grouped  with 
their  friends  as  they  will.  Let  them  shout  chorally 
if  they  are  so  disposed.  Let  them  work  in  a  gang 
if  so  they  can  work  the  better.  But  let  them  guard 
themselves  against  the  idea  that  they  can  have  God 
particularly  or  exclusively  with  them  in  any  such 
undertaking.  Or  that  so  they  can  express  God 
rather  than  themselves. 

That  I  think  states  the  attitude  of  the  modern 
spirit  towards  the  idea  of  a  church.  Mankind 
passes  for  ever  out  of  the  idolatry  of  altars,  away 
from  the  obscene  rites  of  circumcision  and  symbol- 
ical cannibalism,  beyond  the  sway  of  the  ceremonial 


THE  IDEA  OF  A  CHUKCH  167 

priest.  But  if  the  modern  spirit  holds  that  religion 
cannot  be  organised  or  any  intermediary  thrust  be- 
tween God  and  man,  that  does  not  preclude  infinite 
possibilities  of  organisation  and  collective  action 
under  God  and  within  the  compass  of  religion. 
There  is  no  reason  why  religious  men  should  not 
band  themselves  the  better  to  attain  specific  ends. 
To  borrow  a  term  from  British  politics,  there  is  no 
objection  to  ad  hoc  organisations.  The  objection 
lies  not  against  subsidiary  organisations  for  service 
but  against  organisations  that  may  claim  to  be  com- 
prehensive. 

For  example  there  is  no  reason  why  one  should 
not — ^and  in  many  cases  there  are  good  reasons 
why  one  should  —  organise  or  join  associations  for 
the  criticism  of  religious  ideas,  an  employment  that 
may  pass  very  readily  into  propaganda. 

Many  people  feel  the  need  of  pra^^er  to  resist  the 
evil  in  themselves  and  to  keep  them  in  mind  of  di- 
vine emotion.  And  many  want  not  merely  prayer 
but  formal  prayer  and  the  support  of  others,  pray- 
ing in  unison.  The  writer  does  not  understand  this 
desire  or  need  for  collective  prayer  very  well,  but 
there  are  people  who  appear  to  do  so  and  there  is  no 
reason  why  they  should  not  assemble  for  that  pur- 
pose.    And  there  is  no  doubt  that  divine  poetry, 


168  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

divine  maxims,  religious  thought  finely  expressed, 
may  be  heard,  rehearsed,  collected,  published,  and 
distributed  by  associations.  The  desire  for  ex- 
pression implies  a  sort  of  assembly,  a  hearer  at 
least  as  well  as  a  speaker.  And  expression  has 
many  forms.  People  with  a  strong  artistic  impulse 
will  necessarily  want  to  express  themselves  by  art 
when  religion  touches  them,  and  many  arts,  archi- 
tecture and  the  drama  for  example,  are  collective 
undertakings.  I  do  not  see  why  there  should  not 
be,  under  God,  associations  for  building  cathedrals 
and  suchlike  great  still  places  urgent  with  beauty, 
into  which  men  and  women  may  go  to  rest  from 
the  clamour  of  the  day's  confusions;  I  do  not  see 
why  men  should  not  make  great  shrines  and  pic- 
tures expressing  their  sense  of  divine  things,  and 
why  they  should  not  combine  in  such  enterprises 
rather  than  work  to  fill  heterogeneous  and  chaotic 
art  galleries.  A  wave  of  religious  revival  and  re- 
ligious clarification,  such  as  I  foresee,  will  most 
certainly  bring  with  it  a  great  revival  of  art,  re- 
ligious art,  music,  songs,  and  writings  of  all  sorts, 
drama,  the  making  of  shrines,  praying  places,  tem- 
ples and  retreats,  the  creation  of  pictures  and 
sculptures.  It  is  not  necessary  to  have  priestcraft 
and  an  organised  church  for  such  ends.     Such  en- 


THE  IDEA  OF  A  CHURCH  169 

richments  of  feeling  and  thought  are  part  of  the 
service  of  God. 

And  again,  under  God,  there  may  be  associations 
and  fraternities  for  research  in  pure  science ;  asso- 
ciations for  the  teaching  and  simplification  of  lan- 
guages; associations  for  promoting  and  watching 
education;  associations  for  the  discussion  of  po- 
litical problems  and  the  determination  of  right  poli- 
cies. In  all  these  ways  men  may  multiply  their 
use  by  union.  Only  when  associations  seek  to  con- 
trol things  of  belief,  to  dictate  formulae,  restrict  re- 
ligious activities  or  the  freedom  of  religious 
thought  and  teaching,  when  they  tend  to  subdivide 
those  who  believe  and  to  set  up  jealousies  or  ex- 
clusions, do  they  become  antagonistic  to  the  spirit 
of  modern  religion. 

§  5  The  State  is  God's  Instrument 
Because  religion  cannot  be  organised,  because 
God  is  everywhere  and  immediately  accessible  to 
every  human  being,  it  does  not  follow  that  religion 
cannot  organise  every  other  human  affair.  It  is 
indeed  essential  to  the  idea  that  God  is  the  In- 
visible King  of  this  round  world  and  all  mankind, 
that  we  should  see  in  every  government,  great  and 
small,  from  the  council  of  the  world-state  that  is 


170  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

presently  coming,  down  to  the  village  assembly,  the 
instrument  of  God's  practical  control.  Keligion 
which  is  free,  speaking  freely  through  whom  it  will, 
subject  to  a  perpetual  unlimited  criticism,  will  be 
the  life  and  driving  power  of  the  whole  organised 
world.  So  that  if  you  prefer  not  to  say  that  there 
will  be  no  church,  if  you  choose  rather  to  declare 
that  the  world-state  is  God's  church,  you  may  have 
it  so  if  you  will.  Provided  that  you  leave  con- 
science and  speech  and  writing  and  teaching  about 
divine  things  absolutely  free,  and  that  you  try  to  set 
no  nets  about  God. 

The  world  is  God's  and  he  takes  it.  But  he  him- 
self remains  freedom,  and  we  find  our  freedom  in 
him. 


THE  ENVOY 

So  I  end  this  compact  statement  of  the  renascent 
religion  which  I  believe  to  be  crystallising  out  of 
the  intellectual,  social,  and  spiritual  confusions  of 
this  time.  It  is  an  account  rendered.  It  is  a 
statement  and  record ;  not  a  theory.  There  is  noth- 
ing in  all  this  that  has  been  invented  or  constructed 
by  the  writer;  I  have  been  but  scribe  to  the  spirit 
of  my  generation;  I  have  at  most  assembled  and 
put  together  things  and  thoughts  that  I  have  come 
upon,  have  transferred  the  statements  of  "  science  " 
into  religious  terminology,  rejected  obsolescent 
definitions,  and  re-coordinated  propositions  that 
had  drifted  into  opposition.  Thus,  I  see,  ideas  are 
developing,  and  thus  have  I  written  them  down. 
It  is  a  secondary  matter  that  I  am  convinced  that 
this  trend  of  intelligent  opinion  is  a  discovery  of 
truth.  The  reader  is  told  of  my  own  belief  merely 
to  avoid  an  affectation  of  impartiality  and  aloof- 
ness. 

The  theogony  here  set  forth  is  ancient;  one  can 

171 


172  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

trace  it  appearing  and  disappearing  and  recurring 
in  the  mutilated  records  of  many  different  schools 
of  speculation;  the  conception  of  God  as  finite  is 
one  that  has  been  discussed  very  illuminatingly  in 
recent  years  in  the  work  of  one  I  am  happy  to  write 
of  as  my  friend  and  nlaster,  that  very  great  Amer- 
ican, the  late  William  James.  It  was  an  idea  that 
became  increasingly  important  to  him  towards  the 
end  of  his  life.  And  it  is  the  most  releasing  idea 
in  the  system. 

Only  in  the  most  general  terms  can  I  trace  the 
other  origins  of  these  present  views.  I  do  not  think 
modern  religion  owes  much  to  what  is  called  Deism 
or  Theism.  The  rather  abstract  and  futile  Deism 
of  the  eighteenth  century,  of  "votre  Etre  su- 
preme "  who  bored  the  friends  of  Robespierre,  was 
a  sterile  thing,  it  has  little  relation  to  these  mod- 
ern developments,  it  conceived  of  God  as  an  infinite 
Being  of  no  particular  character  whereas  God  is  a 
finite  being  of  a  very  especial  character.  On  the 
other  hand  men  and  women  who  have  set  them- 
selves, with  unavoidable  theological  preconceptions, 
it  is  true,  to  speculate  upon  tlie  actual  teachings 
and  quality  of  Christ,  have  produced  interpreta- 
tions that  have  interwoven  insensibly  with  thoughts 
more  apparently  new.     There  is  a  curious  moder- 


THE  ENVOY  173 

nity  about  very  many  of  Christ's  recorded  say- 
ings. Revived  religion  has  also,  no  doubt,  been  the 
receiver  of  many  religious  bankruptcies,  of  Posi- 
tivism for  example,  which  failed  through  its  bleak 
abstraction  and  an  unspiritual  texture.  Religion, 
thus  restated,  must,  I  think,  presently  incorporate 
great  sections  of  thought  that  are  still  attached  to 
formal  Christianity.  The  time  is  at  hand  when 
many  of  the  organised  Christian  churches  will  be 
forced  to  define  their  positions,  either  in  terms 
that  will  identify  them  Avith  this  renascence,  or  that 
will  lead  to  the  release  of  their  more  liberal  ad- 
herents. Its  probable  obligations  to  Eastern 
thought  are  less  readily  estimated  by  a  European 
writer. 

Modern  religion  has  no  revelation  and  no 
founder;  it  is  the  privilege  and  possession  of  no 
coterie  of  disciples  or  exponents;  it  is  appearing 
simultaneously  round  and  about  the  world  exactly 
as  a  crystallising  substance  appears  here  and  there 
in  a  super-saturated  solution.  It  is  a  process  of 
truth,  guided  by  the  divinity  in  men.  It  needs  no 
other  guidance,  and  no  protection.  It  needs  noth- 
ing but  freedom,  free  speech,  and  honest  statement. 
Out  of  the  most  mixed  and  impure  solutions  a  grow- 
ing crystal  is  infallibly  able  to  select  its  substance. 


174  GOD  THE  INVISIBLE  KING 

The  diamond  arises  bright,  definite,  and  pure  out  of 
a  dark  matrix  of  structureless  confusion. 

This  metaphor  of  crystallisation  is  perhaps  the 
best  symbol  of  the  advent  and  growth  of  the  new 
understanding.  It  has  no  church,  no  authorities, 
no  teachers,  no  orthodoxy.  It  does  not  even  thrust 
and  struggle  among  the  other  things;  simply  it 
grows  clear.  There  will  be  no  putting  an  end  to  it. 
It  arrives  inevitably,  and  it  will  continue  to  sepa- 
rate itself  out  from  confusing  ideas.  It  becomes, 
as  it  were  the  Koh-i-noor ;  it  is  a  Mountain  of  Light, 
growing  and  increasing.  It  is  an  all -pervading  lu- 
cidity, a  brightness  and  clearness.  It  has  no  head 
to  smite,  no  body  you  can  destroy ;  it  overleaps  all 
barriers ;  it  breaks  out  in  despite  of  every  enclosure. 
It  will  compel  all  things  to  orient  themselves  to  it. 

It  comes  as  the  dawn  comes,  through  whatever 
clouds  and  mists  may  be  here  or  whatever  smoke 
and  curtains  may  be  there.  It  comes  as  the  day 
comes  to  the  ships  that  put  to  sea. 

It  is  the  Kingdom  of  God  at  hand. 

THE  END 


T 


HE   following    pages   contain   advertisements    of 
Macmillan  books  by  the  same  author. 


BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR 

Italy,  France  and  Britain 
at  War 

Cloth,  i2mo,  $1.50. 

In  What  Is  Coming?  Mr.  Wells  outlined  the  possible  trend  of 
international  affairs.  In  Mr.  Britling  Sees  It  Through  he  opened 
up  a  larger  view  of  war  and  warring  nations  than  had  hitherto 
been  found  in  literature.  Here  he  discusses  with  an  incisiveness 
and  penetration  all  his  own,  conditions  in  three  of  the  great  coun- 
tries engaged  in  the  great  struggle  in  Europe.  His  study  of  Italy, 
France  and  Britain  at  War  is  divided  into  four  main  sections :  I. 
The  Passing  of  the  Effigy,  in  which  are  reviewed  certain  changing 
sentiments  as  regards  the  war ;  II.  War  in  Italy,  taking  up  the 
Isonzo  Front,  The  Mountain  War,  and  Behind  the  Front ;  III.  The 
Western  War,  and  IV.  How  People  Think  About  the  War,  in 
which  with  delightful  persuasion  Mr.  Wells  wonders,  Do  They 
Really  Think  at  AH?,  or  discusses  The  Yielding  Pacifist,  and  The 
Conscientious  Objector,  and  glances  at  the  Religious  Revival  and 
The  Social  Changes  in  Progress. 

"  Most  famous  authors  at  the  front  have  been  tame  commenta- 
tors. Mr.  Wells  writes  with  the  vim  of  a  born  insurgent." —  Bos- 
ton Herald. 

"  Incisively  keen  are  these  characteristic  and  stimulating  essays, 
but  marred  by  no  trace  of  malice  or  petty  anger." —  Chicago 
Herald. 

"  Mr.  Wells,  the  pacifist,  has  contributed  to  the  literature  of  the 
war  the  most  brilliant  exposition  yet  published.  There  are  a  great 
many  pages  in  the  volume  —  those  on  the  effigy  and  General  Joffre 
and  the  perfected  French  method  of  offensive  warfare,  for  in- 
stance ;  and  his  comparison  between  the  French  and  British  officers 
is  a  miracle  of  frankness." — Philadelphia  Public  Ledger. 

"  Rarely  has  Mr.  Wells  sent  forth  a  volume  more  brilliant, 
keener  in  its  thinking,  truer  in  its  perceptions,  while  the  author's 
restless  intelligence  makes  it  possible,  necessary  indeed,  for  him  to 
include  such  questions  as  the  world  control  of  agriculture,  the  de- 
velopment of  a  new  religion,  the  passing  of  the  hero,  the  other 
matters  upon  which  he  talks  with  illumination  and  the  deepest  con- 
viction. ...  He  has  said  it  with  compactness  and  earnestness  and 
in  neat,  closely  trimmed  sentences  that  often  sparkle  with  epigram- 
matic wit." — A^.  Y.  Times. 


THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

Publishers     64-66  Fifth  Avenue     New  York 


BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR 

Mr.  Britling  Sees  It  Through 


$i.6o 


"  A  powerful,  strong  story.  Has  wonderful  pages 
.  .  .  gems  of  emotional  literature.  .  .  .  Nothing  could 
express  the  whole,  momentous  situation  in  England  and 
in  the  United  States  in  so  few  words  and  such  convincing 
tone.  .  .  .  For  clear  thinking  and  strong  feeling,  the 
finest  picture  of  the  crises  in  the  Anglo-Saxon  world  that 
has  yet  been  produced."  —  Philadelphia  Public  Ledger. 

"  Not  only  Mr.  Wells'  best  book,  but  the  best  book  so 
far  published  concerning  the  war."  —  Chicago  Tribune. 

"  The  most  thoughtfully  and  carefully  worked-out  book 
Mr.  Wells  has  given  us  for  many  a  year.  ...  A  ver- 
itable cross-section  of  contemporary  English  life  .  .  . 
admirable,  full  of  color  and  utterly  convincing."  —  New 
York  Times. 

"  A  war  epic.  .  .  .  To  read  it  is  to  grasp,  as  perhaps 
never  before,  the  state  of  affairs  among  those  to  whom 
war  is  the  actual  order  of  the  day.  Impressive,  true, 
tender,  .  .  .  infinitely  moving  and  potent."  —  Chicago 
Tribune. 

"  For  the  first  time  we  have  a  novel  which  touches  the 
life  of  the  last  two  years  without  impertinence.  This  is 
a  really  remarkable  event,  and  Mr.  Wells'  book  is  a  proud 
achievement.  .  .  .  The  free  sincerity  of  this  book,  with 
its  unfailing  distinction  of  tone,  is  beautiful  ...  a  crea- 
tion with  which  we  have  as  yet  seen,  in  this  country  at 
least,  nothing  whatever  to  compare."  —  London  Times. 


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Publishers     64-66  Fifth  Avenue     New  York 


BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR 

What  is  Coming? 

By  H.  G.  wells 

Cloth,  j2mo,  $1.50 

This  book  is  a  forecast  of  the  consequences  of  the  war.  The 
profound  psychological  changes,  the  industrial  and  diplomatic 
developments,  the  reorganizations  in  society  which  are  sure  to  fol- 
low so  great  an  upheaval  of  the  established  institutions,  are  sub- 
jects to  which  Mr.  Wells  devotes  his  deep  insight  into  men's  minds 
as  well  as  his  prophetic  ability.  Out  of  the  materials  of  the  past 
and  the  history-making  present,  he  constructs  a  brilliant  and 
persuasive  picture  of  the  future,  as  sure  of  touch  as  his  daring, 
imaginative  essays,  as  full  of  interest  as  his  novels. 

Of  special  interest  are  his  chapters  on  the  United  States,  which 
set  forth  the  belief  that  here  in  the  New  World  there  is  being 
moulded  a  larger  understanding  of  the  kinship  of  nations;  an 
awakening  from  the  great  mistake  that  ideals  are  geographically 
determined ;  that  in  America  there  is  the  foundation  of  a  capacity 
for  just  estimate,  which  will  ultimately  find  its  way  into  the 
handling  and  directing  of  international  affairs.  Out  of  the  chaos 
will  come  a  dominant  peace  alliance,  in  which  the  United  States 
will  take  a  leading  part. 

"Wells  speaks  with  remarkable  sureness  and  conviction,  nor 
are  his  prophetic  conclusions,  founded  on  facts,  reasonable  re- 
search and  deep  knowledge  of  human  nature,  to  be  doubted.  The 
voice  of  the  prophet  is  well  tempered  and  moderate,  and  the 
nations  discussed  will  do  well  to  heed." —  Chicago  Herald. 

"  Of  widest  interest  and  consequence  are  Mr.  Wells's  study  and 
discussion  of  those  present  international  tendencies,  nascent  needs 
and  movements  toward  friendship  out  of  which  will  have  to  grow, 
whose  probable  growth,  indeed,  he  forecasts,  some  sort  of  leaguing 
together  of  the  nations  looking  toward  a  greater  measure  of  peace 
than  the  world  has  heretofore  enjoyed."— AT^w  York  Times. 


THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

Pttblislxers   64-66  Eif tli  Avenue    New  York 


BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR 

The  Research  Magnificent 


Author  of  "  The  Wife  of  Sir  Isaac  Harman,"  etc. 

Cloth,  i2mo,  $1.50 

A  book  of  real  distinction  is  this  novel  from  the  pen  of  an 
author  whose  popularity  in  America  is  no  less  than  in  his  native 
England,  where  he  is  put  in  the  front  ranks  of  present-day  writers. 
The  Research  Magnificent  is  pronounced  by  those  critics  who  have 
read  it  to  be  the  best  work  that  Mr.  Wells  has  done,  realizing 
fully  the  promises  of  greatness  which  not  a  few  have  found  in  its 
immediate  predecessors.  The  author's  theme  —  the  research  mag- 
nificent—  is  the  story  of  one  man's  search  for  the  kingly  life. 
A  subject  such  as  this  is  one  peculiarly  suited  to  Mr.  Wells's 
literary  genius,  and  he  has  handled  it  with  the  skill,  the  feeling,  the 
vision,  which  it  requires. 

"  Displays  the  best  in  Wells  as  a  thinker,  as  a  critic  of  man,  as 
a  student  of  social  and  political  crises,  and  —  most  of  all  —  as  a 
novelist." —  Boston  Transcript. 

"An  Extraordinary  ...  a  Wonderful  Book." — New  Republic. 

"A  novel  of  distinct  interest,  with  a  powerful  appeal  to  the 
intellect." — New  York  Herald. 

"Challenges  discussion  at  a  hundred  points.  It  abounds  in 
stimulating  ideas." — New  York  Times. 

"  A  noble,  even  a  consecrated  work  .  .  .  the  crown  of  his 
career." — New  York  Globe. 

"A  notable  novel,  perhaps  its  author's  greatest  .  .  .  might  al- 
most be  called  an  epitome  of  human  existence." — Chicago  Herald, 


THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

Publishew     64-66  Fifth  Avenue     New  York 


BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR 


BEALBY 


Author  of  "The  Wife  of  Sir  Isaac  Harman,"  etc. 

With  frontispiece.  Cloth,  i3tno,  $1.50 
This  is  the  story  of  the  revolt  of  a  little  boy  who  does  not 
want  to  be  a  steward's  helper  or  a  member  of  the  serving  class 
but  whose  heart  is  set  on  accomplishing  "something  big."  It 
is  told  with  a  delightful  sense  of  the  whimsical.  The  situa- 
tions abound  in  humor — that  peculiarly  fascinating  humor  for 
which  Mr.  Wells  is  so  famous.  Bealby,  alias  Dick  Maltravers, 
who  runs  away  from  his  troubles  only  to  encounter  fresh  ones, 
is  as  wholly  charming  a  character  as  Mr.  Wells  has  ever  cre- 
ated and  one  whose  ever  changing  fortunes  the  reader  follows 
with  unbroken  interest. 

"  'Bealby*  because  of  its  sprightly  style  and  multitude  of  inci- 
dents is  never  wearisome." — Boston  Transcript. 

"Such  an  excursion  into  the  realm  of  fun  as  Wells  has  not 
made  since  'The  History  of  Mr.  PoU}^  .  .  .  There  are  more 
sparkles  to  the  square  inch  than  in  any  other  Wells  book." — 
Cincinnati  Enquirer. 

"Mr.  Wells  has  written  a  book  as  unpolitical  as  'Alice  in 
Wonderland'  and  as  innocent  of  economics  as  of_  astrology. 
A  deliciously  amusing  comedy  of  action  swift,  violent,  and 
fantastic." — New  York  Times. 

"It  is  Wells  on  a  vacation,  a  vacation  from  the  war;  a  vaca- 
tion that  will  be  enjoyed  by  every  one  who  takes  it  with  him." 
m~New  York  Globe. 


THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

Publishers    64-55  Fifth  Avenue     New  York 


BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR 

The  Wife  of  Sir  Isaac  Harman 

Cloth,  i2mo,  $1.50 

"  Easily  the  best  piece  of  fiction  of  the  book  season." 

—  Graphic. 

"  The  book  has  all  the  attractive  Wells  whimsies, 
piquancies,  and  fertilities  of  thought,  and  the  story  is 
absolutely  good  to  read."  —  New  York  World. 

"  This  time  Mr.  Wells  is  very  little  of  a  socialist,  con- 
siderably of  a  philosopher,  prevailingly  humorous,  and 
always  clever."  —  The  Bellman. 

"  A  new  novel  by  H.  G.  Wells  is  always  a  treat,  and 
'  The  Wife  of  Sir  Isaac  Harman '  will  prove  no  disap- 
pointment. .  .  .  The  book  in  many  ways  is  one  of  the 
most  successful  this  versatile  sociologist  has  turned  out.'^' 

—  La  Toilette's  Magazine. 

"  A  novel  of  unusual  excellence  told  with  fine  literary 
skill.  Mr.  Wells  has  a  way  of  going  under  the  surface 
of  things  while  presenting  his  incidents  and  characters." 

—  Boston  Globe. 

"  The  book  is  the  most  complete  and  successful  of  the 
group  to  which  it  belongs." — New  York  Times. 


THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

Publishers     64-66  Fifth  Avenue     New  York 


BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR 

The  War  in  the  Air 

Illustrated,  i^tno,  $1.50 

"  It  is  not  every  man  who  can  write  a  story  of  the  improbable 
and  make  it  appear  probable,  and  yet  that  is  what  Mr.  Wells  has 
done  in  '  The  War  in  the  Air.'  " — The  Outlook. 

"A  more  entertaining  and  original  story  of  the  future  has 
probably  never  been  written." — Town  and  Country. 

".  .  .  Displays  that  remarkable  ingenuity  for  which  Mr.  Wells 
is  now  famous." — Washington  Star. 

"  Forcible  in  the  extreme." —  Baltimore  Sun. 

"  It  is  an  exciting  tale,  a  novel  military  history." — N.  Y.  Post, 

New  Worlds  for  Old 

Cloth,  ismo,  $1.50 


".  .  .  is  a  readable,  straightaway  account  of  Socialism;  it  is 
singularly  informing  and  all  in  an  undidactic  way." — Chicago 
Evening  Post. 

"  The  book  impresses  us  less  as  a  defence  of  Socialism  than  as 
a  work  of  art.  In  a  literary  sense,  Mr.  Wells  has  never  done 
anything  better."— Argonaut. 

"...  a  very  good  introduction  to  Socialism.  It  will  attract  and 
interest  those  who  are  not  of  that  faith,  and  cor-^ct  those  who 
are."—  The  Dial. 


THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

Publishers     64-66  Fifth  Avenue     New  York 


AA    000  804  845 


CENTRAL  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY 
University  of  California,  San  Diego 


DATE  DUE 

NOV  03  1972 

OCT  ^  'i  Htli'U 

CI  39 

UCSD  Libr. 

I 


